Schulte has pressured me to create a blog entry about going to Vegas in March. Since we don’t communicate verbally, and aren’t even good at communicating via e-mail, we’ll do it bloggy-style (shoot me for writing that) and discuss the trip in the comments. As far as I know, Schulte and his wife are in, Callahan and his fiancee are in, and Marysharon and I are in assuming we can work it so it doesn’t conflict with our trip to Costa Rica.

If I recall from the last time we tried to plan a trip to Vegas, we’d agreed on everything but no one wanted to be the first to buy a ticket. Why? Because we know each of us are jerks, and if someone buys a ticket, the next two guys will buy a ticket for a different weekend, leaving the first person hung out to dry. Or, the other two may not buy tickets at all. Maybe now that we each have companions there will be less of a fear of that. Or maybe not.

Who’s in for Vegas? When are we going?

Before television, as I understand it, there were game shows on the radio. My question is, why have they gone away? Apparently people love game shows so much that they can still hit it big on prime time television, and there’s even a whole channel devoted to them.

When you think about it, on a lot of these shows there’s not a lot to see. I think Jeopardy! would be just as much fun on the radio as it is on television. Any sort of quiz show where you could play along would translate pretty well to radio, I think. For people on long drives, especially when multiple people are in the car (ex. a family vacation), I think that would be huge. Someone get on it.

Microsoft filmed a video at F5 for their Channel9 site. For most people this may not be interesting, but who knows.

It’s true, this may be my dumbest idea yet. Watch me flush money down the drain each day.

Slashdot posted a story about ZDNet Asia Top 10 Fastest Growing Companies. They seem to be all excited that Red Hat is on the list, although I’m more impressed at this entry:

Looking at the full list, F5 is (in terms of number of employees) the smallest company on there.

MSN Virtual Earth has some neat features that Google Maps does not, one of them being the ability to easily map multiple locations in a single view. Thanks to that, I was able to create a map of where I live and highlight some nearby attractions. #1 is where my apartment is. #2 is Marysharon’s place. #3 is where I work. #4 is the Space Needle. #5 is Pike Place Market. Fil is somewhere near #5. You can also see the Key Arena on the map – that’s where the Supersonics play. If you slide the map further down, you’ll be able to see where the Seahawks play (Qwest Field) and where the Mariners play (Safeco Field).

The new laptop has arrived, and it’s considerably larger than I’d hoped, which kind of sucks. However, the screen is beautiful and it’s making me forget all about the size. I had planned on re-imaging the machine with Windows XP Professional, but caved in and decided to go Linux again – this time with Gentoo/Fluxbox. I had a lot of mixed results last time, but this go around I won’t be using the laptop for work purposes, which means….

1. It doesn’t have to support LEAP wireless authentication
2. I won’t be spending 50% of my time (or more) using Microsoft Word
3. I won’t be using an Exchange server, and therefore won’t need to use Evolution/the exchange connector
4. I won’t be using Rational ClearCase, MS SQL Server, or any other Windows-specific development tools
5. I won’t be hooking the laptop up to a projector
6. I won’t be using VPN software that is more Windows-friendly than Linux-friendly (in fact, the opposite)
7. It doesn’t have a fingerprint scanner on it, taunting me because said scanner has no Linux drivers

Those were all pain points for me with Linux on my previous laptop. Managing wireless connections was also tedius – iwlist/iwconfig – manually typing everything and having no saved profiles, just hacked up shell scripts. I did some research and it seems like GUI tools for this are coming along so I will try them. Also, this time around I made sure to set up a swap partition that was twice the size of my memory, so I should be able to get suspend-to-disk (hibernate) working.

The laptop is up and running now with Fluxbox and Gentoo installed… but I’ll be busy tweaking it for the next few days/weeks I’m sure. It will be nice to have a fully tweaked OS optimized for the machine with no virus scanners running and minimal overhead. When I finally get it set up the way I want, I’ll post a screenshot.

Ok, my apartment is pretty much set and I finally feel like people could reasonably come visit. You can kind of see in the upper left hand side of the picture there is a speaker mounted on the wall. That is one of a pair of Paradigm ADP-370 dipole rears which I picked up at Seattle’s own Definitive Audio. Before I left for Seattle, I picked up their new UltraCube 10 for a subwoofer, so that completes the system. Watching Monday Night Football tonight has been very gratifying. I plan on watching Black Hawk Down in the very near future to really put it through its paces. Come visit. I can almost make it loud enough to drown out passing firetrucks.

The couch has arrived, so it’s starting to feel more like home. Marysharon and I picked out The Big Red Machine.

Earlier today I ordered my new laptop. It didn’t end up being any of the ones I was considering earlier. After doing some laptop browsing for other people, I discovered that the Dell Inspiron 6000 offers a WUXGA (1920×1200) screen option. It also allowed me to upgrade it to have 2Ghz Pentium M CPU, 2GB of RAM, a 7200 RPM hard drive, a PCI-Express-based 128MB graphics card, and internal Bluetooth (obviously internal wireless-G also). All this tallied up to about $2100, until you slap a 25% discount on it (found on Dealcatcher) and I ended up with a pretty sweet machine for $1600 (plus tax). The laptop, as I noticed yesterday, also happened to make PC World’s list of 100 best products of 2005 (52nd). It won’t be as sexy to look at as a VoodooPC, but it will be far sexier to look at on the credit card bill.