Wow...that was close.

I'm blogging from LA Valley College...this bandwidth is pretty cool. They firewall everything but HTTP and HTTPS, but at least under MacOS X I can use AIM Express if I wanted to chat.

Anyway, I almost screwed up on an important obligation. This semester I'm in the LAVC honors society, and I had a banner made up for them. However, I almost lost the damn thing. Luckily all I did was leave it at the cafeteria's cashier station, and the guy was good enough to hang onto it until I got back. Not only did I almost screw up the "mission," I was also almost out $35. Talk about a "dumbass tax."

Anyway, that's over and I safely have the item at hand.

Heh, I'm totally glad I'm on the iBook. People with laptops here in the cafeteria tend to congregate around power outlets, so you tend to hear everything going on. Someone's got spyware, apparently, and a friend is trying to delete it. If I was on the ThinkPad I'd be running Linux so the same would apply.

Windows really is ugly. I want to migrate everything I can off of it. Theoretically if I kept MacOS X on here I could run SPSS for MacOS X and MS Office for MacOS X and be 100% compliant with what Woodbury wants on my computer. The graphic design majors in particular are allowed the option of a Mac instead of a PC so I could probably finagle using this machine as my school computer. However, it would take upgrades, and like I mentioned earlier upgrading this machine is more costly than most iBooks because the clamshell is so hard to field strip and reassemble.

The SPSS people say that there will be a client for Linux...eventually. Until then, I'm stuck with a Windows partition on the ThinkPad. I could conceivably install Win4Lin and Windows98, but since you would have to run Windows98 on top of Linux it would probably be taxing for my poor ThinkPad with its 228MB RAM and 400MHz PII.

Maybe I could convince my family to pay for upgrading this thing and I can keep it on X...upgrading to Panther would be a must because Jagwire is slower than Panther. A bigger hard drive would be nice, but kicking the RAM up to the system maximum 288MB would be sufficient to get things happening.

Another minor annoyance...I don't like the touchpad. My fingers seem to have the right amount of conductivity to make the cursor jump around like a fish out of water when I'm trying to control it. I wish there was something like the Logitech Marble Mouse, only a bit more compact. I might want to lug around a Marble Mouse anyway. However, that would mean also lugging around a USB hub, and maybe even a few other things like a power strip because it's always best to use a powered hub instead of a bus powered hub when you're on a lappie. Meh, I'll get used to the touchpad like I got used to the TrackPoint on my ThinkPad.

Anyway, this is nice as it is. It's a little slow, but it gets the job done. And it's comfortable, which is most important of all. Viva Navi.

Note from home at 6:30pm: Navi has a 3GB hard drive, not a 6GB hard drive. This is a big difference. I really do need to upgrade this machine. I'm going to have to get more quotes and maybe find someplace that is not as allergic to Clamshell iBooks. :P