I’m updating from a new/refurbished laptop that has come my way thanks to the amazing . My wife. *sighs happily* I’m sorry, but you’re going to have to deal with the moon-eyes. They’re going to be around for a while.

I hesitate to call the machine reliable, lest it suddenly become not. Yes, it’s running Vista (Home Premium), but I’m not complaining too much. It is after the SP1 threshhold, after all. Also, it’s a Dell, who happens to also sell machines with Linux pre-installed. So, both wallet and conscience were served.

For Yule, got me a Philips GoGear mp3 player. It’s a spiffy little 2GB player that doesn’t try to be what it’s not. It’s simply a spiffy little 2GB mp3 player (along with other formats). And then, um, I lost it. Dropped it in the snow while moving Aidan’s car seat from one car to another at the crack of dawn. Well, yesterday, the snow began to melt. Hardcore. I looked a few times, but didn’t see it. I’d made myself pretty bummed about the whole deal, since it was a gift. Then, yesterday, lo and behold, Hunter to the rescue…

“Skippy! Your mp3 player! I found it!” We were on our way to Howell to pick up ‘s hopefully-fixed car. I ran over to him, raised my arms to the sky, and yelled “YES!” at the top of my lungs. I picked him up and spun him around, which made him giggle madly. Later, he kept asking why I’d spun him around, not quite grokking the response of “I was -that- happy, man.” I’m just thrilled that he saw that squareish black rubber holster on the side of our driveway.

After waiting a few hours for it to dry, I gave it a shot. My Philips GoGear survived being lost in the snow, shoveled into a snowbank, being melted on, and then being dried out. It works flawlessly. It’s one hardy piece of tech.

Good gift. :)

Saving tabs on quit across multiple browser windows is not something that Google Chrome is good at. However, it seems fantastic at pretty much everything else.

So, there’s a bunch of stuff that I meant to share and/or read that is now lost in the ether. I hope to tread those paths once again sometime in the future.

I’ve officially ditched iTunes on any of my PCs. WinAmp, despite being part of the AOL/TimeWarner megacorp, seems to do what I want it to do with the least amount of getting in my way. Also, it seems to cross the lines with MP3 players. The Sandisk Sansas shows up on it. So does the Creative Zen. I’ve yet to try an iPod. Probably because I’m not planning on purchasing one.

Is the Apple shiny finally wearing off? Probably not as long as VMWare Fusion exists. *drool*

I’m late in posting it, but I wholeheartedly support this:

Also, a Catholic Father in CA defies his Cardinals and speaks out in favor of gay marriage. In this case, I have to say, preach it, brother.

From Google Reader’s help site:

Google Reader doesn’t currently support authentication for private feeds that require a username and password to view. Such feeds will appear to be empty or missing if you try to subscribe to them. This includes Gmail feeds.

Most of the wall of boxes is gone. Unpacked, broken down, and either in my car or stacked. We have a window in the dining room!

There’s awesome stuff hung up on the walls.

There’s books on the shelves.

I’m wearing a green shirt. (Why would I say that? How often have you seen me wear green?)

I pulled Slag (Compaq 266 mhz) out of the stack of computers in the basement, to see if it’d survived sliding around in my trunk for a few months. I mean, the hard drive was failing when I was using it for proof of concept at LW. It booted once, but I was getting a ton of write errors when running the apt-get update on it. So, the Quantum Bigfoot drive died, and I’ve replaced it with another drive – smaller in size, higher in capacity. Upgrade from 4 gb to 6 gb, I think. Anyway, the first of the two 8-port ATI hubs I got at MSU Surplus ($2 each) works, and Slag is halfway through its bare-bones Debian install.

I didn’t know how to dispose of the hard drive properly, because you’re not supposed to just toss a lot of computer parts. A quick Google search brought Back Thru the Future up, and so I’m sending the drive to New Jersey for recycling. If they can make some bucks on the aluminum that’s in the drive casing, and the steel that’s inside it, I’m all for it. Yay for profitable recycling.

I miss Aidan already.

There’s about a billion things in my head that I keep wanting to get out, so I’m going to do a couple at a time.

This weekend’s move will start at 11 AM, and we’ll meet at my current apartment. Tomorrow is a packing/get water and gas turned on/grocery shopping day, and I should have the whole place packed by the end of the day. If you need directions, or the address or some such, just drop me a phone call or a comment here.

I desperately need to shave my face.

traded me a sweet shiny black computer case for my portable CD/MP3 CD player the last time he was down, but I totally forgot to get it to him. It’s sent out with delivery confirmation and tracking, so it best get to him in one piece.

Remember that cassette tape MP3 player that I’ve been gushing about? This one? Well, I finally spent part of my Micro Center gift card on SD cards for it, and it… has issues. It spazzes out with anything longer than a four-minute song on MP3 when it comes to pausing and resuming. It ejects from my car’s tape player with an E11 error – broken tape. So, it’s basically useless to me. I ordered the thing back around my birthday, in early May, and so I figured I was stuck with it. No harm in trying to return it, though, right?

I e-mailed ThinkGeek with the situation, quoted this spot from the ad:

You will have no problems listening to hours of your favorite songs via the built-in SD card slot, and you can easily change to different songs if you have multiple SD Cards.

and got an email back the next day with a shipping label, RMA number, and apologies. So, I’ve packaged it up, labeled it, and sent it back. They’re going to give me a full refund. I think I’ll end up with a microSD-expandable Sansa player, because I want to be just like . I mean, c’mon. Don’t you?