The HP Envy 15 laptop has been in the news lately. A few links:

• HP's site, not very informative.
• Gizmodo's take: Very MacBookPro, but not a MBP. A bit cheaper, but faster/better!
• Engadget's take: A MBP challenger, with lots of pictures

As it happens I'm in the market for a new laptop, but I have time to wait. The left mouse button is deaf on one side, but that's liveable. So what is it about the Envy 15 that has me swooning?

• New Intel Core i7 processor. Smaller, more efficient, faster. Mmmm, tasty.
• GOBS OF RAM as an option .This bad boy can go all the way to 16GB! Not that I'll, er, ever use that much. Unless I get a bad case of Virtual Machines.
• A 15.6" monitor, because I like that size. My eyeballs are aging, and when I'm VPNing into work at 1am to save myself a drive in, I need screen real-estate for many windows.
• ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4830 graphics, so all the UI gee-whiz will actually work nicely.
• Like the MacBookPro, it can switch between power sipping Intel graphics, and power hungry but gorgeous ATI graphics.
• A nicely tuned sound system, which I appreciate. My Dell E1505 already outperforms ashcake's MacBook, I don't know why Apples don't have good sound.
• A whopping 7 hour battery that comes standard (if you use the Intel Graphics).
• An additional add-on battery that can extend battery life up to 18 hours of run time! Ahahahahahhaha!
• Two! Two hard-drive bays! Go balls to the wall and fill 'em with SSD drives and a guy could actually run multiple virtual machines in VMware on this... this... laptop. Dude.
• It comes with HP's QuickWeb, which is linux based. So linux drivers exist for that stuff.

There are some drawbacks, though.

• MacBookPro-style UniButton Trackpad. I've used some elses and I don't like it.
• Linux support is unknown. Some of the drivers to make the special bits work just may be kernel-specific proprietary binary blobs. Won't know until it gets dissected.
• Workspaces. I found out yesterday that OS X has workspaces, just like Linux has had since the late 90's. I've gotten really used to them at work, and miss it when I'm on a windows station doing more than just web-browsing.
• Price. If I go SSD, it'll be over $2K. The laptop before my current one cost $2,300 so I've done it before, but prices uniformly have dropped since 2000 when I bought that one. If I get it, it'll wipe me out to the point that I'll be going to one (1) convention next year and even that'll be a stretch.

Oh, but is it sexy. I sense many fantasy builds once HP posts it.

btrfs looks a lot like NSS, from what I'm reading.

Just saying.

http://arstechnica.com/telecom/news/2009/02/study-consumers-likely-to-greet-femtocells-with-yawns.ars

I'm tempted. I've had dropped calls at home, and SMS takes a while to send messages since the signal quality is so marginal. As I'm on Verizon, I get to figure out if $250 is worth it for me to have better call quality at home. Yes, I'm one of the estimated 30 million US folk with bad cell reception at home.

This is also why we're not going to 'cut the cord' :). If/when we move to someplace closer to a cell tower, we may change our minds. But until then, not really.

Still, I am tempted by the femotcells.

There is this netbook...

http://www.laptopmag.com/review/laptops/hp-mini-2140.aspx

There is really only one spot I'd use it, and that'd be at work. Probably during meetings, or once in a while in the data-center when I need to seriously surf to fix a problem and don't want to potentially poison a Windows server. All in all, probably not worth the $600.

But still. I could make that work.

Not to 2009, but 1999.

This time 10 years ago I was in the planning stages of Y2K remediation. In 1999, I was one of the top 10 overtime earners for my old job. All thanks to the long weekends we put in upgrading stuff for Y2K. Good times, good times.

Today I did not need my tire spiders to get to work! Hooray!

Since last Tuesday I have shoveled a total of 19 inches of snow from my driveway.

Tuesday: 3 inches
Wednesday: 5 inches
Thursday: 4 inches
Friday: a break
Saturday: 3 inches
Sunday: 3 inches
Monday: 1 inch

I'm actually at work today, for a wonder. The drive between my house and the county road was the exciting one. Once I got to the county road, it was smooth sailing. Getting home up the hills will be interesting, but that's why I have spiders.

If you don't mind low twenties and icy roads. It looks great!

WWU is one of the only places running regular hours today. I suspect this has a lot to do with finals being last week and there being no classes today anyway. But I still have to report for work.

I'll be in late. The roads are passible, as we proved last night. But with the number of people heading to work this morning, there is guaranteed to be at least one person who will be driving at 10mph because they're absolutely convinced that it is the safest way to drive on partially icy roads. This is especially wrong going up hills, where momentum can save your ass when traction can't.

If you're driving 20-25, you have enough forward momentum, even on a grade, to skate over icy patches and get to the clean pavement on the other side. If you're doing 10, you'll get to the middle of the icy patch when your momentum runs out, and now you're sliding backwards. Into me. I don't appreciate that.

This will mean I get to work later than I normally would.

Monday, Monday, Monday.

The day after two weekend days.

The day I have to get up at 6:40am after having spent two days sleeping until well past that.

The morning I arise with, on average, 2 hours less sleep than I usually get on my average Friday morning.

This morning there was an unreasonable amount of tea. Because, I didn't get to sleep until close to 2. Tonight I may or may not get a normal amount of sleep.

Plague has swept the office. I'm one of the only ones here.

I spent Monday and Tuesday down in Kent, helping a friend recover from a major surgery. As it happens, they picked up Rock Band for the Wii on Sunday. This meant that the whole house and me were all at about the same skill level for this game, which was nifty. Because of the nature of her surgery, the only thing she could do was the vocal parts (in the after-care instructions is the phrase, "no repetitive motions", as well as the 5lbs weight restriction which was why I was down in the first place).

Once the kids were put to bed, Monday night the three of us spent close to two hours banging away at things with me on drums. Tuesday afternoon while she was taking a nap, I spent some time grinding on the guitar, working on technique. So I actually have played it enough to get a feel for how game play would work. Also, how well it'd fit in our household.

The one caveat to enjoyability I discovered is that you have to like rock music in general, not just in specific. Like anything for general performance, you're going to be playing the same songs over and over again in order to get them nailed. This is no problem what so ever for songs I actually like, and even know pretty well. On the other hand, if the song you have to grind at because you're stuck on it in a Tour is one you don't particularly like (or worse, actively hate) it can lead to resentment. Also, the repetition is a guarantee of ear-worms; if that kind of thing bothers you for songs you like, then RockBand is not your game.

Overall, this is a game I could really enjoy. Especially if done in a group. And heck, depending on how things would work out, I'd even put in the needed hours of practice to get good at some songs.

A while back I bought an iRiver Clix2 media player. I picked this one because of two big reasons:

1. It was a UMS device, rather than MTP, making it a lot easier to use on Linux
2. It had a vorbis codec, so I could use ogg/theora media on it

Like my irrational partiality to .PNG images, .OGG has also stuck with me. All of my ripped CDs are in Vorbis format, since it allows me to play the files on my linux workstation at work without having to have the packman repo for certain legally gray codecs (*cough*lame*cough*). I try and keep my work workstations as legally clean as possible.

It has worked great! Media management is done with the iriver application for it. It's no iTunes, but it gets the job done. The clix2 even can play video I export from my MythTV. I love this thing.

Then the other day I read that Banshee 1.4 came out. Along with that release came better MTP support. Also, a month or so ago I figured out that Audible audiobooks really do require an MTP media-player to work.

So yesterday evening I backed up the files I needed backed up and reformatted it as MTP. Audible saw it just fine, however....

1. The iriver utility didn't, and it turns out that's UMS-only. 
2. Windows Media Player got royally confused with my collection of .OGG files, and I failed in finding a codec or plugin to make it work.
3. Old goodie WinAmp just plain crashed whenever I plugged in the Clix2.
4. Banshee 1.4 saw the device after a bit of convincing, but once it started failing to add files to it, it stopped being able to add files to it until both Banshee was restarted and the Clix2 ejected and reinserted.

Seeing as music playing is the primary function of this thing, and audio-books a distant third, I reformatted it as UMC again and restored my backup.

Perhaps in another year. At which point I'll probably be buying a new media player.

Per this, we have more guidance about the financial future. The big issue is the 2009/11 budget (July 1 to June 30), though we're saving right now in anticipation of bigger cuts to come. Is a layoff possible in my area? I don't see it that likely. In order for it to come to that, we'd have to be passed a cut by the University at the top end of expectation.

Still, the Legislative session that starts January 2010 will have revised budget estimates and set the supplemental budget. If the economy is tanking worse than projected, that'll mean bigger cuts in the last half of the biennium. That's where I see the biggest threat to 'head count'. Not in the 09-10 school-year, but the 10-11 school-year. Bleh.

Gutters.

Since there are plenty of leaf-losing trees up-slope from my roofline, I get a lot of leaves on my roof. And that means clogged gutters. So several times a year I have to go up and de-gunk things. The gutters can and do overflow if I don't do that. And that's bad. Anyone who has lived near ceders can tell you that they also throw needles, and that builds up nice mats in the gutters too! Joy!

I have cleanish gutters now.

As Whatcom County is a vote-by-mail county, there ARE no polling places to go to today. There are places to drop off  your ballot so you don't have to spend a stamp on it. I voted two weeks ago, and haven't seen anything to change my mind about any of the candidates and initiatives I voted on.