Jonesing

Twice so far this week someone on the bus has asked me why I wasn't working on my laptop. "It broke," I said, and they both smiled in tolerant amusement. I admit that I've been getting a lot more reading done; the office is cleaner, too, since I'm now chained to a desktop for most of my high-end CPU needs.

But I'm jonesing to get back to writing, coding, and studying Japanese, all of which require the laptop; it's portability, and the fact that my diskimage of it is actually organized by projects and tasks, unlike the desktop, which is organized by storage needs: games, movies, music, anime, that kind of stuff.

I see according to UPS that my new laptop, provided it's stable, is scheduled to be delivered sometime this morning. Once I've got a kernel installed on it I'll just slap my old OS on top of it and call emerge world to bring everything up-to-date, but I don' wanna wait.

A disappointing misunderstanding

Someone wrote:

A good theory will explain what the world IS and how we can be a part of it--interact with it, make use of it, and so on. Evolutionary biology and Intelligent Design both posit an explanation as to how we got here today. Frankly, is that entirely useful?

This is a saddening, and saddeningly common, misconception about evolutionary biology, one that makes less sense the more you study real biology and its modern implications.

Evolution has almost nothing to do with "how we got here today," any more than modern physics is important to "how the sun got where it is today."

( For broadsides! )

Name, name, I need a name.

My last two laptops have all been named for some dangerous feminine AI from anime (for very flexible definitions thereof): Ai, Lain, and Kusanagi. Now I'm looking for one for my new machine, and I'm leaning toward Kurumi, but there are other possibilities:

• Miyu, from Mai-HiME
• Chi, from Chobits
• Maico, from Anna Maico
• Mahoro, from Mahoromatic
• Jenny, from My Life as a Teenage Robot
• Kosmos, from Xenosaga
• Anevka, from Girl Genius
• Ping, from Megatokyo

So many possibilities! Anyone got a favorite or a counter-suggestion?

Hey, look! It's my life!

Okay, absolutely no one is forgiven for failing to introduce me to TV Tropes, a literary tool for all things tropish, including something I must try to write (seeing as I've already lived it), the Love Dodecahedron.