Back down in the slow zone...

I've shut down the laptop untl the part it needs can arrive.  In the meantime, I'm back down on the desktop, which is a 2001-model with a 1.2GHz CPU, 512MB of RAM, and an annoying tendency to drop characters from the keyboard during I/O.  It also sometimes misses a 'keyup' event, which can be seriously deleterious since I use the ALT and CTRL keys a lot, and more often than I'd like the machine suddenly starts acting as if it's in some weird modality I didn't request.  Hitting the key seems to help.

It's gonna be a long week.  This machine is so small I can run one of Thunderbird, Liferea, or Firefox at any given time, so if you send me email and I'm even slower than usual, you'll know why.

There is much to mock...

I took Yamaraashi-chan malling today, because she wanted to, and I, having limited computing resources and little else to do, decided that it sounded like fun. We could have some father-daughter time together, and the mall is always good of fun things to mock.

First on the mocker list: FYE, or "For Your Entertainment," a retail store that sells CDs and DVDs. I mock them because their idea of "world music" consists of half a dozen reggae albums, half a dozen celtic albums, and a few compliations of "The Best of Senegal," "The Best of Morocco," "The Best of Italy," as if one 72-minute CD could hold anything meaningful about an entire country's entire history.

Second on the mocker list: A woman wearing a t-shirt that read, "Every Time You Wipe Your Butt, A Tree Dies." I mean, isn't that taking environmentalism a little too far? Unless this is an advertisement for the bidet-- a revolution in toiletry of which I whole-heartedly approve!-- it's just disgusting.

Third on the mocker list: the guy at the car dealership who took one look at me, decided "You aren't really going to buy a car anytime soon," and walked away. More fool him; I've got plenty of money for a down-payment and yes, I am, in fact, in the market for a new car. And the Saturn Outlook he was selling? Looks sweet. Too bad I won't be buying from him anytime soon.

Yamaraashi-chan and I did one big circuit of the mall, had a good time hanging out, talked a lot about "getting things done" (she, like me, has a problem figuring out what to do next with her life, but unlike me, she doesn't have much in the way of ambitions yet). It was a fun afternoon.