Cyclopedia Square

I got a sweet new laptop at work. It's a Compaq 8510w . The Core 2 Duo T7500 is fast, 3 GB of RAM is luxurious, and the 1900x1200, 15.4 inch widescreen LCD is pretty. I installed Ubuntu 8.10 and it sleeps (suspends to RAM) and wakes up like no other Linux box I've ever had, which is very, very nice (though the XO has started doing that with the latest update extremely well too). I installed the corporate image of windoze XP under VirtualBox. With the processor's virtualization extensions it runs pretty snappily. I can watch the corporate propaganda WMV movies, use Lookout for calendaring, and access the internal IE-only "web" apps just fine. I went with VirtualBox instead of kvm this time, kind of just to see what the differences where. I had to set up bridge networking because the corporate image didn't like not having a corporate IP address. I hear the newest version of VirtualBox doesn't need this, but here is the script I run to set up bridged...

Sorry it's been so long. I did play with my flashlight some more. I did exactly what I said I was thinking about doing at the end of that last entry, cutting traces and soldering on new wires, but since the wire I used was so thick there was no way it was going to fit back inside the case. I gave myself credit for fixing it anyway. Not long after I read about edge-lit holiday cards . They looked so cool in the pictures I had to try it. My wife scratched her best wintery scene on some acrylic that I paid waaaay too much for at Michael's and I taped together the light source, using one of the LEDs from my flashlight (yep, I broke it again). I think the acrylic from Michael's was too thick and hard to scratch, and looking at the original instructions again, I'm seeing that they used much smaller pieces too. Ours didn't light up nearly as well. It was fun though. Here's how it turned out: I know, not too impressive of a lighting job. The photography...