Speaker For The Diodes - January 8th, 2010

05:24 am - QotD

"Ethics and law are like two forbidden lovers. They meet with the same intent but can never marry." -- an unnamed friend of rbowspryte

10:45 pm - Waaaah!

I'm pretty sure this counts as Not Good.

I've been surprised once already by the Mac showing signs of being Truly $^%#ed and failing to boot, and turning out to be easily fixable (all data intact) with the use of an OS X installation disc. Dunno whether this'll be another case like that or not. Nervous until I know. And already feeling terribly deprived of tools I rely on, after a few hours with a not-booting Mac (several hours of a flaky, cranky Mac while I struggled to keep it running long enough at a stretch to copy my Documents, Pictures, and Music folders to DVD -- which I didn't manage to do).

So there's a Vista machine in the family room, on which I don't have admin privs, so I can't install GIMP or Cygwin until my brother gives me a password (plus, I'm really not liking Vista -- it's ever so much prettier than XP, but seems a much bigger PITA to use, even on faster hardware than I'm used to using for Windows) ... and I brought my Vaio with me but it only works plugged in and doesn't have WiFi (the slot where the WiFi card would go is munged) ... and my mom's XP machine in the study, which needs major de-somethingorother-ing because it's booting, responding to mouse input, launching apps, etc., only about 5% as quickly as the slow Vaio ... and the PDA (running PalmOS), from which I can telnet/ssh (but I have to scroll to see more than 40 characters on a line) and cannot surf the web.

Force me to go back to the kinds of computing resources I put up with a year or so ago, and I feel helpless because it's so much less than what I've gotten used to lately. :-( Plus, at the moment I only have access to my Linux machines at home via telnet from one of the computers I just listed. (I haven't managed to make X apps work over an ssh reverse-tunnel yet -- I can set up the tunnel, and launch an app, but the connection first gets sloooooow, then stops responding, with the exception of xeyes (which sometimes works, but isn't useful for anything other than verifying that I set up the tunnel correctly).

Waaaaaaah!