Tom at 16

Week of March 18th, 2002

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Saturday March 23, 2002

Yup. It has indeed been awhile. But that's life for you -- time flies when you're having fun ;-)

Monday the LCD on my Inspiron bit the dust. I sat and watched while, over the period of about an hour, the screen went from its normally bright and vivid self to black and unreadable. I contacted Dell, got an RMA, and Purlolator picked it up two hours later. I got it back Wednesday morning. Not bad considering the repair depot is in Southern Ontario. While I was a bit miffed to be without my notebook this week, I remained very impressed with Dell -- both their products and their service. I would have no reservations about buying another.

I also remain thoroughly impressed with Gentoo Linux. It is without a doubt the most stable, FAST, and flexible distro I've ever worked with. I love the control I have over what gets installed, the assurance that it's going to compile without dependencies errors (thanks to the Portage system), and knowledge that every app on my system is tailored specifically to the system processor and architecture. I can't wait to try out Gentoo on the eval IBM xSeries server that's coming for a visit to Syroid Manor (should be arriving next week some time). To the best of my knowledge, it's a dual 1GHz box with HW RAID and a Gig of RAM. Having said that, you never really know what's gonna show up until it arrives on your doorstep. Maybe they accidently shipped me an 8-way with 8G of RAM... No idea what I'd do with an 8-way, but it would sure be cool to see how fast it could compile a kernel.

Landon's growing like a weed and causing chaos at every turn. It sure will be nice when the nice weather returns and he can go outside and burn off some energy.

Danielle is growing like a bad weed as well, and doing everything in her power to piss off her parents. In other words, she's being a perfect seven-year-old.

I'll have a "link-day" tomorrow. I've got URLs plastered all over my desktop; if I post them here, at least I'll be able to find them when I want them.

Cheers.

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