malvasia bianca

I just got back from a shopping trip for accessories for the Ultra 20. I ended up at Micro Center, which was a good choice – fine price and selection, focused on computers (unlike, say, Best Buy), and not only do they treat people who enter in their store as potential customers instead of potential thieves (which is why I refuse to go to Fry’s), they even have a good number of sales staff (unlike no end of stores out there). I will be happy to patronize them in the future.

So now I have a monitor (19 inch 1280×1024 LCD, nice to see how cheap those are), a keyboard with a touchpad built in (good thing, saves me from having to find a pointing device that won’t kill my hand and figuring out where it will live), and a few cables. And I was in a good mood, so I bought an external DVD writer (hmm – why didn’t I buy an internal one? I thought I had a reason for that choice, but I can’t remember what it was), so I can back up the computer, and a couple of external hard drives. The main purpose for the latter is to back up my CD collection – a lot of the CDs are starting to go south, and I’d rather back them up raw instead of as MP3s. (Disk space is cheap, after all.) And having that in an external hard drive means that I can store the backups off-site. (We just got a larger safety deposit box; I have to fill it up somehow!)

The Ultra 20 and the networking stuff should be here by Thursday, so I guess I’ll spend the end of the week setting that up, and moving my home Linux use off of this laptop. (I’ll still use this laptop as an X terminal until the new laptop arrives. And probably even occasionally after the new one arrives, since Liesl will want to use the new one during those rare moments when she can pry herself away from Animal Crossing.) The only remaining task before then is to download and burn a set of x86_64 FC4 CD’s; easy enough to do.