A week of changes.

“Forgive me Blogosphere. It’s been 9 days since my last posting…”
A lot has happened that’s new an interesting in the last week, but let me touch on a few highlights. I have many interesting postings brewing about various topics, but here’s a few tidbits…
Kubuntu Linux Rocks
Yes, I had ANOTHER hard disk fail on me. This took my home dir with a fair amount of localized twiddling with it, though the way I run my laptop – all my mail files, web work, source code, etc is all stored on a remote fileserver. (Note to the masses – a Laptop is not a permanent storage medium. Always remember that, and design your processes so you can recover your environment within 24 hours). I decided to try Kubuntu Linux, since it appears to be a widely-supported, Debian backed setup specifically designed to streamline KDE operations. Wow is it impressive. KDE 5 is a masterpiece, and just keeps getting slicker and slicker. I haven’t found anything truly broken so far, but I’m still working through it. I’m running the most recent ‘cutting edge’ release, named ‘Dapper’. Updates are coming fast and furious, but for now, I’m up and running (total time from having a new drive in my hand to up and running with a restored home dir, and up on the net with mail, web, IRC, chat, and dev environment: 12 hours. I’m getting better at this.
Arisia Rocks!
This past weekend saw Arisia come to life. This is a great SF convention, and the one I consider my ‘home’ event. I was the head of registration, using my own system and hardware to run things. All went smoothly despite a misfed printer during peak time on Friday, and a great time was had by all. Still slightly sleep deprived, but all in all good.
Treo 650 goodness
Yes, I know in my previous post I railed against the evil that is Verizon. However, my Kyocera 7135 just rebooted One Too Many Times, and it was time to replace it. Despite Verizons evils, I renewed my account with them, picking up a shiny new Treo 650. More chitchat about this later on, but for now, it’s one mighty sexy device, I have to admit.
There’ll be more detailed posts about some of the fantastic tools I’m finding in KDE 5 coming along in the next few days. Now, alas, I must prep for a trip down to New Jersey for a few days. Whee!