Feeling a little "bleh" today...then again, I've been feeling like this all week. I'm not feeling sick or anything...just very low energy.

I finally succumbed to peer pressure and set up a LiveJournal account. I do not intend to move this there...my lone post on my LiveJournal is a link back here. However, I needed to do this to participate in other people's LJs. So yeah, if you absolutely, positively want to see my LJ, here's the link: http://www.livejournal.com/users/msgeek/ As you can see from the links back to friends' blogs, all of them are on LJ. I still like Blogger infinitely better, though. Nicer interface, a more stylish result, and the ability to control a lot of things I cannot at LJ.

Yesterday I talked to my Cousin Brad and the hard drive came in. This is the hard drive for my faithful ThinkPad. I will pick it up a week from Saturday, when I attend my Cousin Jack's Bar Mitzvah. Jack is Brad's son. (Pity the English language doesn't have enough nuance to differentiate the term "son of my cousin" from "cousin.") I am not sure whether I will install this myself or whether I will chicken out and find a tech to do it for me. I also need to decide whether or not I want to have more than a 7GB space for Windows 2000. I do want Linux to be the main OS on the machine, but I need sufficient room for Windows. Why? Woodbury University wants me to.

(beware, there be geekspeak ahead...)

There is a "gotcha" about the ThinkPad 600E...it will only boot an OS that it finds in a partition that is smaller than the 1024 cylinder limit. Using the Int 13 BIOS calls, that limit is reached at roughly 8.4GB. To be safe, I am going to make the first partition of the HD 7GB to give enough room for Windows, and still allow a boot partition for Linux under the 1024 cylinder limit. What happens with the next partition is under consideration. I could put a second VFAT (FAT32) partition there for Windows, or I could just let Linux colonize the whole rest of the HD, giving me 33GB of Linux goodness. It would certainly be easier to do the latter, and all my Linux fanboy friends will love me for it, but it might limit what I can do in Windows.

Then again, the old 10GB hard drive currently in the machine will be usable from a bay module, and that will be 100% formatted in FAT32. So maybe that will work for extra Windows storage space. I don't have to always have the CD-ROM in. That would give me 17GB of Windows space and 33GB of Linux space. That wouldn't be too bad. That might be the way I'll run things.