Tag: computer

Summer!

I know, I know, summer’s more than halfway over and I’ve not posted a thing since February 29. Trina from the future’s gonna be ticked off at Trina from the past for neglecting her LJ. Well, Trina from the future, deal with it! 😉

Further to my last post, I did wind up getting the Samsung Galaxy S7 phone (gold colored). I had intended to buy it from AT&T despite the fact that they were selling it for more than all of the other phone companies. But they wouldn’t sell it to someone without a contract. I use a Pay-As-You-Go card and stuff $100 on it once a year. I don’t have any contracts. So I wound up buying it from Amazon. Got an international version (better innards, apparently) in the process. Love it. 🙂

This has been an interesting summer. In June, I attended a 3-week workshop on teaching physics using a modeling method. This, I hope, will completely change the way I teach physics this year (and every year after) to a more effective way. It’s exciting and daunting all at once. So I’d like to apologize (a) to all of my physics students in the past for not being very efficient at teaching you physics and (b) to this year’s physics students who will have to deal with me learning how to teach physics in this new way. (By “new” I mean new to me – physics modeling has been around for decades, I’ve only just recently been trained in it.)

In order to continue having fun during this 3-week workshop, I visited several of the Metro Parks in the Columbus area. One was just north of the hotel where I was staying. The other 3 were between the school where the training was and my hotel. So each afternoon after class, I’d go wander for over an hour in the woods (or gardens in the case of Inniswood). It was lovely. I also tried out different restaurants in the area. But I packed my breakfast for each day, and the lunches at the modeling workshop were usually fairly nutritious. So I managed to keep my weight pretty stable during the training.

This was finally going to be my big Upgrade Summer for my PC. I discovered when I started researching parts that I was way out of the loop these days. So I went to CyberPowerPC to see what parts would make a good build. When I sourced them from newegg.com, I found there was maybe only a difference of $150 from what CyberPower would charge versus newegg. I decided it was worth the extra to have someone else build it for a change (and get Winders 10 working on it). It all worked out well, except for two hitches.

The first hitch was how CyberPowerPC ships their PCs. They used UPS, but wouldn’t allow the recipient to make any delivery changes, not even with MyUPS. It was scheduled to arrive on a Tuesday when I was in Columbus. And I couldn’t get them to change the date till Friday. Thankfully I was able to get UPS to hold the PC at their shipment location in Piqua (thanks to Justin S. from CyberPower!) and thus picked it up on my way home from Columbus. Yay, I had a new PC!

I had also bought a second SSD hard drive from Amazon (sorry, newegg, they had it cheaper) in order to install Ubuntu on it. Only I discovered that I had no SATA cables. Of course nobody local sells SATA cables. Thankfully, a former student of mine works at the local Staples and he gave me a spare that he had (one of many) in the back. Ubuntu and I fought for quite a bit, but I finally got it to play nicely in my new machine. Files were transferred, a new backup drive was fitted and LuckyBackup software was run. Things were perfect! (Well, OK, turns out I managed to pick the ONE sound card that doesn’t and will never have Linux drivers. Gee thanks Creative! Thank goodness for (a) motherboard sound cards and (b) y-cables which allow me to have 2 sound cards connected to the same speakers.)

And then the second hitch hit… Before having the machine a week, I started seeing some weird flickering on the screen. At first it was just a little and only in Windows. Then World of Warcraft became completely unusable. Then I started seeing the glitches in Ubuntu. I did as much troubleshooting as I could (even tried to install the new card into my Old PC only to discover it didn’t have enough power cables to connect it) and then e-mailed CyberPower. They had me try something else, but when it failed, they sent me an RMA and had me mail the dud card back. The replacement arrived on Tuesday and I’ve not yet seen any glitching!

Now, between sending my bad card out and getting the replacement, I spent a weekend with and in Downers Grove. Of course, being the interesting summer that it is, it wasn’t as straightforward as that. The night before my flight to Chicago, I got a text from Judi telling me that she had a detached retina and needed to have emergency surgery the next day. “Do you still want to come?” My question was did *she* want me to come. She said she could use the help, so I kept my plan to go.

Only apparently Southwest wasn’t all that up on my plan to go. I was scheduled to fly out on Wednesday at 8:20pm, but Southwest’s servers were all wacky. I had no idea it was happening – the day before I’d checked in with no issues. The folks and I went out for dinner before we headed to the airport. I got to the counter and they told me the flight was cancelled and here’s an 800 number to call. By the time I got a hold of someone, my folks had picked me back up and were taking me home. I got another night with my kitties and resolved to call first thing in the morning.

Well, after 4+ hours on hold the next day (over 3 phone calls), I finally was able to schedule a new departure for that evening. The flight was delayed, of course, but we had some live music at the gate to entertain us. (Sadly, when the saxophonist was done entertaining us, we could once again hear the RNC on the telly.) Mum kept me company via text messaging, and eventually we got to take off. (Thursday’s issue wasn’t the servers anymore, but a really big ass storm over Chicago. Part of which Elsa had to drive through on her way to pick me up. Eep!)

Despite everything, I got to Judi’s new place. I helped her where I could (mostly in unpacking her remaining boxes and helping her to organize stuff). I explored the neighborhood during my morning walks with Patty. We tried out a restaurant that serves Dim Sum (which was very good) and her local sushi joint (also good). Elsa and I checked out the farmer’s market. And Judi got to keep her head down and sleep on her belly to help her retina reattach. Joy joy.

So August will start on Monday, whether we’re ready for it or not. I get one more trip before school starts whereupon I shall invade my sister for a long weekend. Here’s hoping there’s no emergency surgeries or downed servers or big ass storms. I’d like to get there & back again with little fuss. I intend to start working on getting my lessons ready starting this Monday (since I have decided to take July completely off, heh.) With our current bouts out hellishly hot days, I have all this time during the day when I don’t want to be outside (I do my walks in the morning), so working on lesson plans etc will be a good use of my time.

My final thing for this post will be to post the video that I made earlier today. I wanted to see how well my new PC can handle video editing. (Even *that* wasn’t straightforward! The video playback was so choppy. It took some research, but I found out that it was an AUDIO problem… Once I had the right settings in Premiere Pro, it worked a charm.) The video clips are from my various walks at the Metro Parks plus from Memorial Day weekend (with Elsa & Judi at the Lake) and some Lucy & Linus, of course.

Tweaks & Geeks

Well, I think I’m nearly there with regards to my Ubuntu 12.04 install. 3 years ago, I first built this PC and stuck Ubuntu 9.04 on (along with Win7 RC). I haven’t regretted the switch to Ubuntu, but getting it “Just So” has reminded me of much of the hassles I had the first time around.

If you’re curious on whether I was able to save the data on my 640GB HDD or not – well, I wasn’t. I wound up using GParted to set it as an NTFS drive, but this wiped the data. No matter, I reformatted the drive, named it the same as my original data partition (TrinaStuff, of course), and copied the data over from my backup. (Yay for backups! I really need to get that setup with this new system!) So all is well in that regard.

I think I finally have the look the way I want it (enough purple to satisfy, but not overwhelmingly so). I’m using Gnome 3 shell since I just didn’t care for Unity. (I use an older Unity on my netbook and it’s ideal for that.) I had to add minimize and maximize buttons next to the close buttons (and switch them to the right side). I added my little weather extension so it sits next to my date & time. I re-enabled the startup sound (which is off by default in 12.04) cuz I need those drums, man! Got the NTFS filesystem (where my data is saved on the 640GB drive) so that I can delete to the trash can. Is there any way to tweak a new system without using Google? Heh.

A few things I’ve not been able to do yet. I can’t seem to get a verbose boot to work. I wanna see stuff that goes on. That’s why Linux is better than Winders, man! Nothing hidden! 😉 I can’t find a way to sync my (old Windows Mobile 5) phone to Evolution. Synce, the program I used to use, hasn’t matured with the OS. So now I’m contemplating an Android phone (Galaxy S3, perhaps?) I’ve got GMail set up with my current calendar & contacts just ready to go for the upgrade. As mentioned before, I haven’t set up backups yet, though I’ve installed LuckyBackup, the program I used before. So almost done!

Here is a snapshot of the current look, with a few windows open to see the overall look. (Wallpaper from the BBC’s website.)

Screenshot from Ubuntu 12.04

Upgrading to SSDs

I have been contemplating, for quite awhile now, getting two SSDs to run my two operating systems on. And to start out my summer, I have finally Done the Deed. Woo!

I ordered two 128 GB Crucial SSDs from NewEgg and they arrived a few days later (and of course, the price dropped right after I ordered ’em). They are so teeny tiny! They’d fit nicely in a laptop, but I was putting them into my PC. (Used Scotch brand Removable Mounting Squares to stick ’em in. Well, one sticks, the other hangs cuz my power cables are a bit limited ATM.)

I started by putting a fresh install of Ubuntu 12.04 onto the first SSD. I’ve been using 10.04 since it came out, and 12.04 is the next Long-Term Support version. Installation was quick and easy and I soon had my first SDD ready for prime time.

I decided for Winders to try the cloning technique that the Transfer Kit (which came with the SSD) recommended. Only to discover that with the software they provided, you couldn’t clone a partition onto the drive. (My HDD had been partitioned to an Ubuntu partition of 70GB, a Winders partition of 70GB, and the remainder of the 650GB drive for data.) A bit more searching online and I found a free software that let me clone onto the SDD from just the partition.

So now I had Windows 7 on SSD, but the master boot record was screwed up on it. A bit of googling helped me figure that out, and soon I was booting into Winders. I immediately tested World of Warcrack (the main reason I have Winders on my PC) and it worked.

Today I’ve been getting e-mail & browser settings working on the new Linux install – e-mail was a bit tougher to do, but when I decided to stick with Evolution rather than switch to Thunderbird (the software that Ubuntu 12.04 ships with), it got a lot easier.

Now I’m working on spreading out the data partition of my old HDD onto the entire drive. Winders Disk Mangler has done it – sort of. It’s funny, in Windows you see that the drive is now 650GB, but in Disk Mangler, it’s in 3 pieces. All of them are labeled as drive D:, but Ubuntu has had issues seeing it. Hoping a bout with CHKDSK might cure it. (If not, I do have the drive backed up onto my external backup. I’d just prefer it to work outright.)

Regardless of how the CHKDSK goes, my two new SSDs are working great (and very fast – they’re not even as fast as they can be since my motherboard is only 3GB/s while the drives are 6GB/s). Yay for new technology! 🙂

My Internets goes up to 11!

Last year around March, I gave up cable TV. I realized I hadn’t actually watched TV since the Olympics and wondered why I was paying so much a month for it. Unfortunately, Internet without any bundling is a bit pricy around here. So I dropped down from the 12 Mbps I had been getting to 3 Mbps and paid $40 a month for it.

For the most part, the slower speed was unnoticeable. But there were times when it was noticeable. Still, I didn’t want to bother switching to anything else (heh, there is only 1 alternative around here). For one thing, silly ol’ me had been using my Road Runner account as my main spam-trap business/shopping/etc e-mail.

Then, as Time Warner always does, they increased the bill. I was now paying $42 a month. And the mailings from Windstream (my phone company) to switch to them seemed even more tempting. So I decided to go for it. I upgraded online, sticking, for the time being, with a 3Mbps program and going with the wired-only modem/router. Meanwhile, I started switching all my shopping etc e-mails over to a new pagefillers one. I’m mostly converted now.

Nothing happened. I received no packages. I got no e-mail response. And eventually another Time Warner bill showed up. A month had passed. So this time I phoned and got a very nice sales lady. And she was so good at her job, I wound up going with the 12Mbps service and getting their wired/wireless modem/router. And today, the modem/router showed up.

Speedtest.net confirmed it. With Time Warner Ripoff, I was getting 2Mbps (2?!?!?!?) download speeds. With Windstream, I’m getting more than 11! (12, even, as advertised). Rock on!

And instead of paying $35-40 a month for phone plus $42 a month for internet, I’ll be paying $70 for phone and internet AND FREE LONG DISTANCE – woot! Suck air, Time Warner! (I could drop down to 6Mbps for $5 less a month and 3Mbps for a further $5 less.)

I’ll be keeping an eye on Windstream and they’d better behave for awhile. They should be grateful that I don’t trust Time Warner with my phones (but if they start doing the price raising every few months, I’ll consider switching again).

Ah, my need for speed is sated!

New Laptop! (AKA, Trina has no will power)

Before I turn all geeky, however, I want to thank folks again for helping out with Relay for Life. I haven’t heard yet from our team leader on how much we raised overall, but I do know that our Miss Relay contestant (who, sadly, came in second) single-handedly raised $420 in one hour. He was dressed as Marilyn MANroe. (Last year he was Daisy Dude and took first place.) The first place Miss Relay wasn’t nearly as cute, but he was part of Team Honda. Car builders have deeper pockets than lab workers, I suspect. 🙂

So, what’s all this about a new laptop, you ask? Well, if you’ve been following via Twitter, you know the bulk of it. Basically, it goes like this.

A month or two ago I was looking hard at laptops to replace my poor ol’ Averatec laptop. I had a series of specs, including dual core and under $500. But nothing came close. So I decided it wasn’t the time.

Then for her birthday, Amy asks me to research a travel laptop for her and contribute (if I could/was willing) toward the purchase of said laptop. No problemo, I thought. So I did some searching and when I was doing Free Comic Book Day this Saturday, I stopped into Best Buy. And damn, there it was! The laptop I’d been looking for! 12″ screen or less? check! Dual core processor? check! Under $500? check!

But I didn’t buy it there. Instead, I got the specs and headed home to do some research. And discovered that Best Buy actually had a great price for it. I called Amy to let her know that this laptop would meet her specs and then some. She decided to check it out and wound up ordering it the next day from the website. Supposedly the price was going to go back up (and might have in store), but the online price was still $379.99. I kept sitting on it, but finally Monday I caved.

When I ordered it, it wasn’t going to come in until Friday at the earliest. But when I checked the tracking number today, it was OUT FOR DELIVERY! Woot! I basically ran to the door when the UPS guy showed up. (He faked me out & sped by the door originally. But must have u-turned and drove up to my door. Woo!)

So I charged it and have been installing software. Waiting until I hear from Amy before uninstalling shit. We can have an Uninstall Party over the phone. Heh. (Is there something wrong with me in that I downloaded Firefox before I downloaded the firewall/AV?)

Speaking of AV, I ran Comodo after installing and updating it. And it found two infected files! Brand new computer and it comes with viruses. They were both from a Wild Tangent game, which is one of the many reasons I NEVER install Wild Tangent willingly. (That program used to be a real PITA when I was the computer tech at school.)

Anyhoo, this laptop will become my WebDev machine. I’ll share my D drive on the main PC and install my Adobe WebDev Suite on here (after deactivating it on my main PC). Hopefully now it won’t dribble to a crawl when I’m running Skype, Dreamweaver, and Firefox at the same time like my poor Averatec did.

Winders 7 Upgrade for $29.99

When I found out about Microsoft offering Winders 7 for $29.99 to college students (thanks to Twitter) I immediately pre-ordered it, then passed the news along to my Twitter followers. And promptly forgot to mention it to LJers on my list. Whoops – sorry about the oversight!

So anyhoo, if you’re interested and you’ve got a valid .edu e-mail address (and preferably proof that you’re taking at least .5 semester hours in case they ask), you can pre-order Winders 7 for $29.99 from http://www.win741.com/. Click on the box that says “Buy.” You can get Premium or Professional, 32 or 64-bit. (I went 64-bit, Pro.)

UK college students, you, too, can be infected, er can buy Winders 7 for a low price as well. http://www.microsoft.com/uk/education/studentoffer/

My main OS will still be Ubuntu (and I’ll probably upgrade to 9.10 when it comes out later this month), but for gaming and a few other Winders-only programs (MediaMonkey specifically), I’ll have my Winder 7 partition.

(Of course, I’m writing this current post on my laptop which has Winders XP on it. Heh.)

New PC – Yay!

I am writing this LJ post from my new PC. I ordered all the pieces over the weekend and they showed up today. NewEgg, you rock!

I’ll put the specs up later, once I’ve gotten my old data onto this new PC. But I got it built (first time in years that I’ve built a PC from scratch) and Ubuntu 9.04 (64-bit) installed. Now to repartition the drive for a Winders install and a data directory (so Winders & Linux can share my files). Alas, due to my gaming addiction, I still need Winders. Going to try Winders 7 RC1 to see if that will work. 🙂

Learning Linux

The best way to learn how to work with a new operating system, I think, is to have something not work right and then try to fix it. If everything is working perfectly, you learn nothing about the workings of the OS.

Ubuntu on my Dell Mini has been working perfectly in all of the stuff I will likely use it for. However, one of the reasons I wanted a Linux-based netbook was to see how easy/difficult/whatever it would be to use for my classroom computers. Since most netbooks come with XP Home, which will not work properly on a domain (no easy way for kids to access their accounts) I thought maybe Linux might be a solution, provided I can do everything with Linux that I currently do with Winders with my students. And I’m thinking more & more that netbooks will be the way to go when I get my new classroom in 2010. (No room for PCs in my new room and netbooks are half the cost – at least – and half the size – at least – of normal laptops.)

The Ubuntu on my Mini had everything I’d need in my classroom (a word processor, spreadsheet, web browser, pdf reader) except for Logger Pro. Logger Pro is a graphing program by Vernier that goes one step further than their earlier (and still brilliant) graphing program Graphical Analysis: it can interface with the LabQuest handheld units which we use in physics. LabQuests allow you to connect various scientific probes to it and gather data which can be viewed on the LabQuest or uploaded into Logger Pro for further analysis and eventual pasting into word processors for lab reports. Vernier already had Logger Lite available for such a purpose, but Logger Lite doesn’t do all of the analyses that I use in physics nor can it be used as a stand-alone graphing program.

So I checked on Vernier’s website recently to see if there were any plans to port Logger Pro to Linux. And sure enough, there was a link to join their beta testers on Logger Pro for Linux. I joined the group, deleted my VirtualBox Winders 7 and stuck Ubuntu on there. It installed peachy keen, but I just couldn’t get the virtual USB to connect to a LabQuest. No matter, I had a Dell Mini on the way, I’d test it then.

The Mini arrives and I play and learn and eventually get around to installing Logger Pro. Which, unlike on my VirtualBox, doesn’t go well. Indeed, after the drivers supposedly installed, the Logger Pro program told me it didn’t have all of the dependencies on the machine and wouldn’t install. I posted to the beta forum and waited for the Easter holiday to be over.

Sure enough, I got a response Monday from one of the Vernier techs. A couple of e-mails passed by, I learned a lot about installing & uninstalling using dpkg, and the first Vernier tech put me in touch with one of the actual Linux gurus who’s working on the software. While corresponding with him, I’ve learned to do even more things, such as unpackaging i386.deb files and repackaging as lpia.deb files, compiling a new driver using make, and stuff like that. I thanked the tech at Vernier for getting the opportunity to do all this stuff in order to learn more about Linux. His e-mail to me today started with “You rock!” That made my morning.

Anyhoo, after work today, I built a kernel specific driver for my Dell Mini and tried Logger Pro (which I had gotten successfully installed yesterday after the i386 to lpia conversion) with the LabQuest once more. And there it was! Data from the LabQuest (temperature probe attached) on my Dell Mini. I was so excited, I boiled some water, called dad up to come over for a Geek Emergency, and reconfirmed Newton’s Law of Cooling with a cup of boiling water and Logger Pro. Dad was as delighted as I was. (We are geeks, remember.)

So anyhoo, success with Linux and Logger Pro. I’ll continue to test with other probes. I’ll be interested to see which dialog boxes are too large for the netbook screen. (I know the interface list is just slightly too large, but that may be something we may not use in my class.) So anyway, according to one Vernier tech at least, I rock. 🙂

*blush* Boy is my Netbook Red!

I waited and waited for Acer to get the right combo for their Aspire One (Linux, SSD, *and* a 6-cell battery) but they never could. Then Dell started lowering the price on their 9″ Mini and it was tempting. And then they had a one-day sale with a further $50 off their Linux, SSD, 4-cell Mini. And they had red ones. So I had to order it. (8GB SSD & 1GB RAM for the curious.)

It arrived today. Woohoo! Dad’s arrived yesterday and we all agreed it was really cute and cool. (His is white.) He’s decided that he loves Ubuntu. Had the easiest set up of a computer ever. My own experience today was equally pain free. I took photos during the opening and all that, which I’ve posted to my Pagefillers Gallery. Here’s a photo of the red lovely (downloaded & edited on the Mini, then uploaded to Pagefillers.com):

The verrrrrry rrrrrrrrrrrred netbook.

I’ve only got two complaints about the Mini so far – funky keyboard arrangement (apostrophe and dash are in odd places) and the beta version of LoggerPro for Ubuntu wouldn’t install. (Not too worried about the second issue – the purpose of the beta is to get it working for as many Ubuntu and Linux users around – I’m sure the folks at Vernier will get it sorted out.) Dad’s got a complaint about his – his screen keeps going black for no apparent reason. Hopefully Dell (or Ubuntu, if the Dell tech he chatted with tonight actually knew anything) will get his issue sorted out.

Since I’ve been working a lot with Firefox add-ons of late, my Mini does much of what my main PC and laptop do. I’ve got the TwitterFox add-on to keep up with the Twitter folks I follow. I’m using the SyncPlaces add-on to keep my bookmarks synced between the three devices. Like with my laptop, I’ll stick with webmail for e-mail. For non-Firefox programs, I’ve got Pidgin for AIM, Drivel for Livejournal writing (it’s like a bare-bones Semagic), GIMP for image editing, F-Stop for getting images from my camera, etc. I was even able to installed my supposedly Winders-only laser printer on here. Cool beans.

Oh, for music, I figure I can use Pandora and Last.FM. Although the speakers are considerably tinny, with my earphones hooked in, it’s really nice sound. I was tres impressed. It hooked up to both my WiFi and dad’s without a hitch. Oh – and the most astounding thing? It came with a recovery DVD! I didn’t think any computer company sent a recovery DVD along with the machine anymore! (OK, so no DVD drive on here, but I figure we can copy it to a flash drive if we ever have to.)

My next task will be to find DirSync or something similar because I’d like to set up the 4GB SD HC card I’ve stuck in the SD slot to backup my Documents folder whenever I click a button on the desktop (or similar). Don’t think I’ll be filling this little duffer up with a lot of stuff, so the 4GB of space remaining will likely be sufficient. (I can see this coming in handy when doing research/book reviewing in the library when I finally get started on my Masters).

Well, I’ve found a drawback with GIMP on this Netbook – some of the windows are too big for the resolution so I can’t see to change file types or other little things like that. I was going to make a new LJ icon, but I’ll have to do that on my laptop or PC.

Electronica

Of late, I’ve been having a love/hate relationship with my electronics.

First, my DVD player, which wasn’t even a month old, had its HDMI port go kablooey. Bummer. I knew when I bought the Philips DVP5990 that some people were having issues with the HDMI port, but I really liked the idea of a USB port in my DVD player and some upconversion of my DVDs. And I usually have good luck with electronics. Still, this one decided to be a butthead and its HDMI port decided it liked the color pink more than any other color. I went to Philips unhelp site and did everything it suggested for the known issue (if it’s a known issue, Philips, why don’t you FIX IT?!?). It stayed pink. I e-mailed their tech support and they said I should phone ’em. Hell, I didn’t want to waste an evening talking to tech support. So I decided instead to switch to component cables and see how long that lasts. It’s not been a month yet, but so far, so good. Considering my TV maxes at 1080i anyhoo, and these are just upconverted DVDs not Blue Ray, the quality is good enough for me.

My second betrayer actually lasted more than a year – but not much more. The SmartParts digital frame which my folks gave me for Christmas in 2007 died. I did whatever I could think of to snap it out of it, but no go. But I’ve gotten used to having a digital frame in my library. So I decided to research digital frames to see what I needed. 7″ was sufficient and if it did 400×234 images, that was fine cuz I already had a set of images from the SmartParts frame. Although a remote would have been nice, it wasn’t a necessity. After seeing one in person at Staples, I decided that the Kodak EasyShare 720 was the frame for me. And best of all, I found it on eBay for $49.95 incl shipping. What I love best about it is that you can set the length of time between photos in the slideshow mode. I have it set for 30s now – I might go longer in future.

Although I’d had my eye set on an Acer Aspire One netbook, I kept getting disappointed when I couldn’t find the combo I wanted: 6-cell battery, SSD, Linux, a color other than black. So I kept my eye on other netbooks. I’d tried HP’s mini and liked the keyboard, but the battery size was only 3-cell and they were pricier than other brands. Dell had a linux version on SSD with a 4-cell battery, but it was initially way too expensive. And the only free color was black. But then Dell started to lower its price (as only Dell can). Eventually the 8GB SSD with 512MB RAM linux netbook was $249. It was tempting. But as I intended to get a red one and get at least 1GB of RAM, the price kept going over $300. And then came Tuesday… $50 off the linux netbook just for that day. I couldn’t wait to get home to buy it. (Hey, I was pricing them at work cuz I figure netbooks will be my future computer lab there!)

So when I got home, I called dad (cuz I’d called him earlier to let him know about the sale and caught him as he was ordering one – heh). While talking to him about his purchase (he went for the barebones one in white which, with tax and shipping, was around $220), I was busy on Dell’s site customizing mine. Although white was now a free upgrade, I decided I didn’t want black or white. Indeed, since I’d been to the site at lunch, there was now BLUE. It was tempting, but I went with red. I also upgraded to 1GB of RAM. Even with those two upgrades, the final price incl shipping & taxes was under $300 (around $280). Yay! Our netbooks won’t arrive until the middle of April or so.

In non-tech news, tomorrow is the groundbreaking for our new school building. At 1:30pm, the entire study body and community members will congregate near where the new building will be built. And lucky me gets to be one of the high school staff representatives to turn over some dirt – woot! I’ll see if dad can get a photo of me turning dirt so I can post it to my blog. 🙂 Keep an eye on the Newton New Building Updates page – there will eventually be a link to a video camera pointing to the job site.