The World of Stuff .com

Stream of consciousness IV

It’s dark out. I’ve been sitting here at the computer for a while — in fact, pretty much all day. I’m on spring break right now, and I’m trying to enjoy it. Sure, I have lots of calculus homework to do, but I want to wait. I’m looking forward to staying up late over the following week to watch The Daily Show and Colbert, neither of which I’ve seen in months. What can I say? I go to bed early because I wake up early. I don’t want to wake up early, but I do. I woke up exceptionally early this morning — 6:30, to be in fact. I tried to go back to sleep, but I couldn’t. I must have thought it was a Friday (when I wake up at 6:30 to go to work), but more likely the dust in my room was irritating my nose.

I haven’t really done much today at all, as I said. I did trick out Ubuntu quite a bit, though, by adding a new login window and splash screen. Some people may wonder why it matters, but I did it to go with the theme that I’ve made up, which is predominantly blue. I hope soon to get to the point that working at Ubuntu becomes transparent — i.e., I don’t use it, thinking, “Hey, this is Ubuntu instead of Windows, which is what I’m used to.” That probably won’t happen soon, though, because I read somewhere that it can take a year or more for someone to know the ins and outs of a particular operating system. Oh well. I’m enjoying the Linux experience.

And as my mind inevitably turns to the future, I’m thinking about what kind of laptop to get. Obviously, one that runs Linux, as the main reason (or one of the main reasons) I switched to Linux was for the cost (usually free). It’s my understanding that laptops with Linux preinstalled (they do exist, keep reading) are cheaper than equivalent laptops with Windows. Actually, they may not be, but with Windows you have to pay for a lot of the software, but on Linux it’s mostly free. Besides that, I really don’t know how the cost figures into things — or, rather, how things are figured into the cost. I need to do my homework when it comes to hardware and stuff. I just found out recently that this computer is, by the standards of March 31, 2007, slow and old.

Anyway, when researching laptops with Ubuntu pre-installed, System76 immediately emerged as the definitive leader. They apparently have great customer support and are determined to help you when you buy from them (or even when you don’t). Plus, they have guaranteed hardware support, which is a must when Linux hardware support is kind of patchy and unpredictable. Supposedly, System76 laptops come with Wi-Fi working out of the box, which is pretty neat because I think there’s a wireless Internet connection thingy in my house.

I want a laptop that won’t get outdated quickly and that looks slick. Obviously, affordability is important too. My friend Brian says he just got a laptop from System76, so I have to check it out for myself to see what I could be getting. He said he got the cheapest one, which does look pretty cheap. I’d like something a little nicer and sturdier with plenty of room on the screen to see stuff (a big screen, I mean). And I don’t want their expensive white one that looks like a Mac. I think a white laptop would just get dirty and ugly over time. Besides that, I don’t want people to think of me as an artsy, turtleneck-wearing, cappuccino-drinking Mac user if they see me with such a laptop. I am incapable of being that smug, and I know more about computers than that. (But I still don’t know a lot.)

Speaking of knowing or not knowing a lot about computers, my latest Greasemonkey user script is a masterpiece, and I anticipate it becoming a big hit. It’s gotten about 75 installs in the past 24 hours. It’s called Google Search Counter, and it is intended to satisfy an idle curiosity I’ve had for a long time. How many Google searches do I perform a day? In the 24 hours since I’ve been using the script, I’ve made 50 searches, and that’s just the main web search (which is all it counts, for now at least). I plan to have it count how many searches I do throughout the whole of next month. It should be interesting to see.

For nerds only: HTML Tags Illustrated.