Sunday Morning

Sitting in Krispy Kreme across from the Costco where I’m having four new tires put on the car. The Continentals that came with it barely made 43K, so now we’re going to have some nice solid Michelins warrantied for 60K, which at current use rates means I shouldn’t need new tires again before the start of the 2014 college football season. If then. Getting rid of the stop-and-start driving from my last job (literally 19 stops in 3 miles) should do wonders for tires, brakes and gas mileage alike.

(New paragraph here. It looks fine on the website, but for some reason isn’t there in the RSS feed. I guess it’s time to start asking around and see a) who reads this drivel and b) who reads it on the site as opposed to a feed reader. I don’t know of any blog that I don’t read through RSS anymore.)

The Mini is a perfect travelling companion – when put by itself in the old blue Timbuk2 sleeve I used to use for 12-inch Apple laptops (or even a 13″ MacBook with some squishing), you can throw the bag over your shoulder and it feels like it’s still empty. Typing is fine, RSS reading through Google is fine, Facebook is usable…and since we’re in Googleburg this morning, Wi-Fi is free and plentiful. Assuming you can see the antenna. I really need to get to work on setting up the secure version of Google Wi-Fi again, but it’s slow going especially on an iPhone…

Speaking of, I have a weird problem with the iPhone where you can put the switch in the “mute” position and the phone will vibrate like crazy as it toggles between “mute” and “not mute” every time you barely touch it in the general vicinity of the switch. Screen, side, just setting it down on the table is a show. But so far, it behaves all right in the normal position, so I have put it back in the hard case and just left it on. I guess it’ll have to be turned off altogether if I’m in a critical situation. And as always, there’s the Worst Case Scenario fallback of letting work pay for my phone directly and accepting the new hotness…which won’t be the new hotness anymore by summer, so I am strongly incentivized to wait.

After some trepidation, and the realization that resizing partitions in Linux isn’t something I’m really competent to do, I have left the Strumpet with all four operating systems installed. I don’t know what XUbunutu is going to be for at this point, though, because I really have been successful in getting everything up to scratch in UNR. The Wi-Fi works (after some driver weirdness), the codecs are in place to stream Absolute Radio or watch ripped episodes of Father Ted, and the Drivel app actually posts to the blog without a fight. I have a feeling I’m going to come to regret not having system-wide spellcheck in text fields, but that’s for another day.

And last but not least, before I walk back over to be fleeced of $500, this advice: a glass of club soda on ice, with a squirt of lime juice and four firm dashes of Angostura bitters, makes for the single best non-alcoholic fireside refresher you can imagine.

We’re not talking about Vanderbilt basketball today…