poltr1 | Mar. 8th, 2008

The boss dismissed us early yesterday. We left at noon, and had lunch at One Eyed Jack's, which was still open. I took surface streets home -- North Fairfield to Indian Ripple to Shroyer to Far Hills -- instead of I-675. The roads in Beavercreek were lousy. I don't know if it's because Greene County is more rural than Montgomery County. It took me about an hour and a half to get home.

I shoveled the steps and a neighbor's steps when I got home. I then made a run to Kroger to pick up some meds, and to do some shopping. The freezer is full and I need to start eating meals that are inside.
A few hours later, it looked as if I hadn't shoveled at all. I stayed inside last night and watched a hockey game. Once again, the Blue Jackets lost. :(

Today I cooked some sausage and eggs for breakfast, along with some coffee. This afternoon, I'll probably have lentil soup, and dinner will be a frozen dinner.

I still have all my utilities -- electricity, water, telephone, cable TV. For that, I'm thankful. There are some folks in Darke County (northwest of me) who have not had any electricity since their ice storm earlier this week.

Some time ago, I mentioned that I had dibs on an old Pentium III laptop at work. Earlier this week, we cleaned out two cubicles in preparation for new employees, and a lot of old and unused computer things were thrown out. One of the "things" was an old Gateway E4000 desktop, which I was using until last year, when the hard drive started to fail on it. I managed to vulch that machine, along with some mice, a power cord, a modem, and some phone and network cables. And Jeanne (our admin assistant) said that I could have the laptop.

And so, I took it home on Thursday night.

While cleaning out the carrying case, I came across a copy of Windows NT Workstation 4.0, Service Pack 5, and some old manuals. But that's not what I'm going to install on the laptop. Once I get a hard drive for it, I'm installing Ubuntu 7.10. I've already ran it from the laptop's CD-ROM, and it appears to work nicely. Especially the games. I'll just need to know how to install new hardware, when it comes time to do so -- floppy drive module, modem, network card, wireless network card, USB devices, etc.

For the Linux geeks out there -- and I really should make a filter -- how easy or difficult would it be to install these devices? I'm not expecting plug-and-play, which is one of Windows' main selling points (ease of use). Are drivers available?

Oh yeah. If you want to be included in my Linux filter, post a reply to this message. I'm already planning to include