Catching Wind

With the recent sale of my 5-year-old Dell Inspiron 5100 laptop (which I used to like to affectionately refer to as "this fucking heavy piece of crap" because it weighed more than 7lbs) to a sucker friend of mine, I've committed myself to buying a new one. For a while I was thinking of blowing about $1600-$2000 on a shiny new M1330, complete with GeForce 8400, but then I realized that that would be a fantastically stupid thing to do. Considering that I was generally happy with the performance of an old P4 2.4GHz during the 15 minutes per week I'm more than three feet away from my quad-core gaming desktop, it makes little sense to blow that kind of money for a mobile powerhouse.

Instead, I've decided to jump on the newly trendy (and affordable) sub-notebook bandwagon. I was eyeing the Asus EeePC for a bit, but I've heard too many things about the keyboard on an 8.9" laptop being too small for stubby fingers like mine, the screen being too low-resolution, and then there were the battery life issues. I also looked at the HP 2133, which has more CPU power than the Eee and better resolution, but shares the small keyboard issue and is more a'spensive. But then, along came MSI with the Wind, and I think we have a winner" $550 gets me a 10" 1024x600 screen (and with it a slightly wider keyboard), a 1.6GHz Atom CPU, 1GB RAM, 80GB HD, bluetooth, 1.3MP camera, and 5.5 hours of battery life running Windows XP. Not bad, not bad at all. Those specs should have no trouble handling the stuff I used my FHPoC for, and weigh less than half as much doing it.
The catch is that it's not yet available, and I'm going to be flying cross-country on June 8. All indications have it going on sale in two weeks (on June 3), so that gives me a five-day window to procure one. C'mon Costco, Wikipedia says you'll have it. Help me out here!

Note: seeing Indiana Jones tomorrow night. I'm cautiously optimistic that I won't hate it.

Failure

"Last post: May 5, 2008"

Holy crap, I fail at blogging.

The delay game

I'm about to leave for the airport to fly across the country on a United Airlines flight. Anyone care to place bets on how much of a delay there will be? With UA, I've found that it's not a question of if the flight will be delayed, but how long. (At T-3 hours, they claim the flight will be on time.)

I'm going to be optimistic and say that it's going to be between 15 and 30 minutes late. However, I predict that the trip back is going to be delayed at least an hour.

Edit:
Scorecard:
Departing flight left on time. Shocker. It was, however, compensated for by extreme proximity to the flight's standard-issue screaming baby, and a comically inept car rental employee who wasted a bunch of our time when we got there.

Returning flight sat on the runway for about an hour. On the bright side, I slept through the entire ordeal.

Mis vacaciones Mexicano

As of this past weekend, it can no longer be said that I have never been to Mexico. So suck it, people who would say that! You know who you are.

I've been to San Diego many times over the past few years - I've made a habit of spending my New Year's Eve celebrations down there with a concentration of college buddies - but never bothered to go the extra 20 minutes south to cross the boarder. But now, seeing as Mexico is pretty much the one country left with a favorable exchange rate, and Virgin America was offering some $38 fares to San Diego, I made an exception.

The most shocking thing was crossing the boarder into Mexico without so much as an "¡Hola!" from customs. Why, it's almost as though Mexico doesn't care if you bring things down there. Of course, going the other way is another story all together.

On the strength of a very picky friend's recommendation, we ended up at Hotel La Fonda, which we found despite it not actually having a street address of any kind. I managed to find it on Google Maps, but it couldn't compute directions there even though it's pretty much a straight shot.


View Larger Map

Good thing that whole area is gringo-friendly - we couldn't believe the amount of construction going on, building up affordable condos for white people priced out of San Diego. Fortunately for us, that also meant plenty of English road signs.

Arriving at La Fonda, we found that they offer three levels of accommodations: La Fonda for $100 per night, La Fonda Bungalow for $125 per night, and (not making this up) Kinda La Fonda for $75 per night. We went for the middle of the road, not expecting too much for that money, but damn:

That's not a bad view! Especially when indulging in non-happy-hour $3 margaritas and pina coladas and similarly affordable mountains of nachos. We ended up spending most of our time relaxing at La Fonda, going for walks on the beach, and hanging out at the extremely cheap-but-tasty restaurant. Despite a couple of unidentified smells, La Fonda has definitely made the short list for repeat vacationing in the future.

IM Client Wars

Today a handy Lifehacker post introduced me, and apparently everybody else on the internet, to a new multi-protocol IM client called Digsby. I've been a satisfied Pidgin user since upgrading switching to Vista a year ago, which turned out to be incompatible with my old IM client of choice, AIM 5.2 (with the now-defunct AIMutation installed to remove all of the bloat and add chat window tabs and logging), but I like to be open-minded when it comes to new software options. After playing with it for a day, I'm ready to proclaim it to be full of potential, but not quite ready to supplant Pidgin as my go-to IM app.

What I like:
* Cleaner looking than Pidgin. Pidgin suffers from that open source look that reminds one of Soviet architecture. Even the skins are a bit crap. Digsby, by comparison, has a much more polished look and includes a variety of (mostly ugly) skins and themes.
* Not having to install three separate applications to make it work. Seriously, I get that Pidgin is a community project, but c'mon - Aspell, GTK+, and at least one other program just to make an IM app work?
* Better email management than Pidgin. I can even compose email to be sent through Gmail within Digsby.
* Facebook integration. Not that I'm a huge Facebook fanatic or anything, but it's nice to not have to load the page to see when people post updates or to change my status message.
* Customization - I can customize how the buddy list displays information to an almost ridiculous degree. For example, if I want buddy icons displayed at all, I can have them to the left or right, and any size I want. If I want a status icon, it can be to the left or right, or it can be a "badge" on the icon. Craziness.
* The ability to drag and drop conversation tabs between windows, or out of a window to create a new window. I can't tell you how many times I've wished Pidgin would do this.

What I don't like:
* Most of this can be filed under unfinished features, like wonky text formatting, no hyperlinking in IMs, can't set your own icons for buddies, etc.
* Eats RAM like it's Firefox or something. Why does an IM client need 75MB of RAM? The developers claim to be working on optimization, though, so this could be a temporary issue.
* Can't change what my name shows up as. I don't care what my screen name is, I want it to show up as "Me." For example, I want the conversation window to look like this:
Me: Hello.
[Insert your name here]: Check out this awesome link!
Me: Die in a fire.
* Can't disable emoticons (without a hack). There's no emoticon to express how much I dislike emoticons.
* Log viewer is on par with Pidgin, but not as good as Trillian's. I want to be able to see all the conversations I had on a given date, dammit, not just one contact at a time. Search also needs to be log-wide, not just the currently selected conversation.
* Nowhere to store buddy notes. I need somewhere to jot down notes on PR contacts, or specify which people I hate, and why. Pidgin has this one.
* Lack of individual alerts. This is something I haven't been able to use since AIM 5.2, but I had all kinds of fun assigning different sign-in sounds to each person. I could who was signing in without even looking at the buddy list.
* Can't specify where I want my chat logs stored.
* Ugly logo. If your logo is a fat kid, you're doing something wrong.

However, if Digsby manages to fix even half of these issues, it stands a good chance of winning my heart/mind.

Adventures in Public Transportation

I would like to share with you a conversation I had with a crazy lady at the train stop.

- Exterior, Train Station -
Night

I am clearly enjoying an episode of Lewis Black's Root of All Evil on my Zen. A woman who appears to be in her late 50s approaches, walking her bike, and sits down next to me.

CL@TS: *In unidentifiable accent* Do you know name of god?
Me: *Takes off headphones* Excuse me?
CL@TS: Name of god?
Me: *blinks* Is it...Pedro?
CL@TS: No. Is Yahweh.
Me: Are you sure? I'm pretty sure it's Pedro.
CL@TS: Jesus is his son.
Me: I thought Pedro's son's name was Jose.
CL@TS: Do you have Bible?
Me: I really don't want a bible. *Puts headphones back on, ignores CL@TS until train comes*

And scene.

Trekrospective

On the topic of decade-old TV shows, and because I'm a huge nerd, I've been re-watching Star Trek: Deep Space Nine recently. The first couple of seasons (before the Dominion War) weren't nearly as dull as I remembered them. Less shooting and explody things, sure, but there also wasn't a single "Oh no, the holodeck is malfunctioning!" episode in there, which is quite a virtue for a Star Trek show. Ignoring the two child actors (which should be illegal) and some irritating Quark-centric comedy relief episodes, there are some complex and dark storylines and characters (like Garak) that set it way apart from the rest of Trek - the other four shows had a nasty habit of cannibalizing everything prior like nerdy vultures. DS9 had the same kind of social commentary with a political skew to it, making it at least tied for my favorite series with TNG. I also can't help but think that it was a good thing the show ended before 2003 - a major character who had been a terrorist resisting a brutal occupying army probably wouldn't have gone over very well.

As a side note, poking around IMDB in a where-are-they-now sort of way (an alarming number of the cast doesn't seem to have worked since,) I stumbled across this:

My god, he's a Monty Python character. There are some who call me... Tim.

The horror

I just had a conversation with my mother in which she mentioned my lengthy adventures with United Airlines on the Vancouver airport runway last week. What's wrong with that? I had not told my mother about said adventure. Which means that despite my five years actively not mentioning to my parents that I have a blog might have failed to adequately conceal this site. Which means she could be reading this, right now. Which also means she could be reading my stupid "ageaculation" joke from the previous post. The horror. The horror.

And once again, the Onion has turned out to be eerily prophetic:

Mom Finds Out About Blog

MINNEAPOLIS, MN-In a turn of events the 30-year-old characterized as "horrifying," Kevin Widmar announced Tuesday that his mother Lillian has discovered his weblog.

Premature Ageacjulation

There is very little that makes you feel old like the realization that a show which, as far as you recollect, started up fairly recently, begins its twelfth fucking season. That's quite simply not cool. I may be preparing to vote in my third presidential election (third time's the charm, I hope) but that doesn't qualify me as old, in the traditional sense, does it? Besides yelling at people to turn off that damn rap music, I'm very young at heart - why, I don't even have a lawn to yell at punk kids to get the hell off of. And the fact that I play video games for a living pretty much qualifies me as a man-child, so I think I'm safe for another year or two at least.

Mad rantings of a delayed air traveller

I would just like to take a moment to say fuck you, United Airlines. Thank you for turning a two hour flight into a nine-hour experience that involved two airplanes and sitting on the runway with inadequate air conditioning for a good deal longer than the time spent in flight. I got to taxi out to the runway a total of three times for a single takeoff. Attempt #1 was thwarted by a malfunctioning flap. It took them a good half hour to track down a maintenance guy to look at it, and a further hour and a half to decide to let us off the plane and re-book us on a flight that taxied out to the runway, only to turn around and return to the gate because of a paperwork error, wasting another hour. Well done. The bag of mini-pretzels totally made it all better.

That said, I did finally get some reading done - about 400 pages into Michael Crichton's latest (gotta love a book with monkeys in it). And I was sitting next to a guy who looked remarkably like Nathan Fillion with a comically elongated chin.

As a side note, where has this been all my life?