Books 2009 - 3

A Long Fatal Love Chase - A. M. Bernard (who is really Louisa May Alcott) - very, very good potboiler. Stalker and the woman who resists him. Amusingly, the endbit says that Alcott considered Little Women and such, "moral pap for the young." I feel better about not liking L.W. a lot.

Mr. Impossible - Loretta Chase - decent enough romance novel

Your Scandalous Ways - Loretta Chase - not bad, with unrepentant prostitutes as the main characters.

Year's total: 28

The toy & the schoolwork

I have an Acer Aspire One, running Linpus Linux. We've added a spare gig of memory to it, so 1.5 G RAM, 8 G hard drive, 2 slots for SD and other cards for more storage. A sweet little thing. I must admit, I'm having a lot of fun playing around with Linux. It's a small system, running a locked down user interface bsed on xfce. I've unlocked it, and found terminal, and set up the CVS that keeps track of who makes what changes to the code.

I'm not going to mess around with it too much, since this linux has been optimized for the hardware. Something like 20 seconds boot time.

I am setting it up to do these things: web browsing, dissertation writing, coding in vi. I could probably run Eclipse (the common coding application in the lab) with it, but the screen is 19.5 cm by 11.5 cm (7.75" by 4.5") and I don't think I have the screen real estate for it. I'm still getting used to vi, but it's really not bad.

I've been delving into the mysteries of the bash shell script. I am so pleased and proud of myself when I figure out how to do something, and it's so cool to change 20 files with one long command line entry.

About a month ago, I got some results. Some honest to goodness, actual results. The resulting high, plus some freaking about paperwork, led to late nights of coding on the toy. Right now, I'm frustrated because Im chasing bugs in order to get more results. Somehow, I suspect that is the normal state of a stat mech person.