From "t3h l33t" department:

I now have my $24 eBay LaserJet 4P printer up and running on my "daily drive" Linux desktop machine, and I'm loving it. For all the money I've spent buying ink cartridges for my trusty old DeskJet 810c, I could have bought a new laser printer years ago. It's times like these you actually start personally relating to Homer Simpson.

Hopefully, since I'm running Linux here, I'll be able to share this printer around to the other machines here in my lab. Most operating systems can send a print job to an LPR queue, and that's in essence what CUPS is, with a bunch of fancy stuff added.

I even went so far as to order a dustcover for it. My apartment is above a row of garages so people's cruddy exhaust tends to blow in. This results in an icky "superdust" that is way hard to remove from things. I will be temporarily putting a towel over the printer when not in use but after I receive the dustcover I'll use that to protect it. I want this printer to last me a while.

Boy, I'm now sounding like freakin' techie Martha Stewart. Which leads us to the second station on my train of thought for today. Apparently Ms. Stewart isn't going to spend her sentence in a fashionable Connecticut minimum security prison. She's not going to Federal Pound-Me-In-The-@$$ prison, either. She's off for a West Virginia vacation at 'Camp Cupcake,' a minimum security "prison camp for women." She gets out in March and will be under house arrest for 5 more months.I don't have much sympathy for her, but I kind of admire that she's going to take her medicine and "put all this behind (her)" rather than engage in protracted legal warfare.

Tomorrow's the first of the three Presidential debates. I'm not sure whether I want to sit through it or not. There's not going to be any "real" action to these debates...they are locked down and 100% controlled. We're not going to see any fireworks. But I might watch anyway. It depends on what I'm doing at the time.

Oh yeah, this weekend I'm coming up to Santa Barbara to get the updates done on my laptop. I've finally gotten to the point where yeah, I'd better have some gurus there to help me get the work done on it. Also I haven't been up to see my buddies there in a while so this will be nice. A change of scenery will do me some good.