Today was the last day of work before the bank holiday weekend and the trip to Madrid. It was a great feeling to walk out of the office today, knowing I'm not going to be back in there until the 18th. It was made even better by the fact I managed to get my jobs down to practically zero, so that was good news.
I've been trying to get a laptop ready for the Madrid trip in case it comes in useful. I've decided on the Panasonic Toughbook CF-M34, which is a very tiny machine, but is one of the military spec models. It's only a hunble P3-400mhz with 192mb RAM but it isn't too bad. It's got an insanely strong case, the first laptop I've ever seen where you can twist it in your hands and it doesn't move. Not a single creak. All the other laptops I have are big and fragile and I can't be bothered taking a huge one. It also has a touch-screen, which I've never got working.
However, being a tiny sub-notebook, the Toughbook has no internal CD-ROM or floppy drives. Because Linux is tricky with wireless cards, I thought I'd put a temporary install of Windows XP on there by putting the hard drive into another laptop. But no, XP doesn't like being installed on one machine and then booting up on another. It has a tantrum and blue-screens. As does Windows 2000 Advanced Server. I tried formatting the drive from a Win98 boot disk, and copying the install files. The installer ran and spent about 2 hours copying files that were already on the hard drive, but then failed after it rebooted. So after a long session of cursing I put Ubuntu Linux back on it again, going full circle. Linux doesn't like booting up on a strange machine either, but at least it drops you to a command prompt so you can reconfigure the graphics. Ubuntu is a pretty decent Linux distribution, I've ran various versions on both x86 and PowerPC hardware and when it works, it works well. When it doesn't work...well, fiddling around with text files and command prompts is fun, right? Right?
Well, that was a nice bit of geekery for you. I found a nice Spanish tutorial here:
http://www.ielanguages.com/spanish1.html
It looks quite decent. Probably should have looked this up months ago, but hey.
Currently listening to Reise, Reise by Rammstein.
In case you're wondering what the pic is all about, check this thread out on Something Awful. I was inspired by the recent Robocop entry. However the forum thread has been Dugg, so the server seems to be dying. Check back later though, it's quite funny.
http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=2412676&perpage=40&pagenumber=1
That's about it really, can't think of anything else to put.
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