Soup

When historians come to write up this latest week of my life, it will probably become known to them and to posterity as the Week of Soup, covering the whole range from unadulterated Heinz'z Tomato Soup (still my revert-to-childhood fallback when I'm too sick to eat otherwise), via ramen in kimchi soup at my favourite Japanese restaurant, to a magnificent French onion soup last night with Sean & Gerry. Today, there is my own bastard roast tomato and carrot soup for lunch, which I shall adulterate in many ways.

Also, I have a pumpkin. Courtesy of Gerry and her allotment, I have a rather wonderful pumpkin, and am wondering what to do with it. Soup is almost my first thought (I do also have what used to be a gallon of chicken stock, which I have boiled down to a two-inch cube of rigorous jelly for freezing purposes, but it can always be unfrozen and reconstituted), but I may be letting my enthusiasm for the form run away with me. What else should I do with a pumpkin? Enthuse at me, o internets...

In other news, I am about to run out of William Gibson. That man is so good, he can make me pine for clothing that doesn't actually exist. Grr.

Three things, which may be three sides of the same thing

I don't (you may have noticed) much like bandwagons, following the crowd, marching in step. That kinda thing.

I am extremely, some would say excessively, sometimes self-harmingly loyal.

Change makes me anxious; I will put up with a lot of sub-optimal stuff rather than risk what is new and might be better, might be wonderfully better but, y'know. Might not work. Might be calamitous. Like that.

So. I have spent - oh, all the years since I got broadband, which is many - saying that I really don't need wifi; when I'm working, when I'm using a computer for anything I'm always on the desktop, so why do I need wifi? Ect ect.

Turns out that I needed wifi for Other People, who are a goodness.

So. Wifi was achieved, and I have been ill, and a few days ago I was sitting on the sofa shivering mightily over the gas-fire and wanting to check my e-mail and not wanting to drag my achy body upstairs into the cold, and I thought to myself, "Y'know what, self? I have wifi now. If I weren't pinned into this chair by the contentment of a cat, I could just reach for the Laptop of Heavenly Perfection and check my e-mail right here, right now. And read LJ, that too. And..."

And of course I could do none of that, on account of pinnage and the importance of not disrupting contentment; but the thought was there.

Hold that thought.


The Laptop of Heavenly Perfection, being Sony, is full of non-standard hardwares and cryptic components. I dual-boot it with the Windows that it came with, which is Vista (yes, I know: but I don't use Windows, so it doesn't matter to me) [hold that thought] and Linux, as is my custom. Only, I am a Suse man by long habit, and the version of Suse that I tried on the LHP gave me no visuals at all, it just couldn't drive the screen. So - following a recommendation from this here flist - I fell back on Mepis. Which worked, and continues to work, fine, except that it can't run the wifi. If I want wifi, I have to boot Windows.

Hold that thought.


Working as I do, many mornings in the Lit & Phil and evenings & weekends back here, I am necessarily always shifting files between laptop and desktop. Sometimes I do this physically, via a USB memory stick; sometimes I do it electronically, via my G-mail account.

Last week, in pursuit of other options, I started playing with Dropbox. A self-sync'ing storage system, up in the clouds: how useful is that?

Except that Dropbox doesn't want to install in a Suse/KDE system, such as I am running here. The download options for Linux are Ubuntu or Fedora (or compile-from-source, but that won't either; it needs Gnome packages and pathways that just aren't there). This could be fixed, I think, with fiddling; but I keep putting it off.

At the moment I have Dropbox on all my Windows installations, so I find myself actually working in Windows when I'm at the Lit & Phil, to take advantage of that with their wifi; and when I come home I download the new files from the Dropbox website. Which works, but is an extra step and inherently sub-optimal.

Hold that thought.


This week, being sick, I have been noodling with the LHP, with wifi, with Windows...

This morning I downloaded an ISO image of Ubuntu, burned a CD, ran it live in the LHP.

Works fine. Wifi and all, straight in there.

Um.

I'm a Suse/KDE man to my bones. I don't like change. Ubuntu is way too popular for me and I've never used Gnome.

But: wifi. Dropbox. Convenience. Workingness. Newstuff to play with...

I think, I think I am going to blitz Mepis, install Ubuntu and see how we go. If we go well, I might even make the same change on the desktop here, just for Dropbox. I'm thinking about it, anyway.