(Eee)nvy

I finally gave in and bought the Eee 900 from Costco, prompted by their 90-day no-hassle guarantee. In a nutshell, they’ll take it back within 90 days, no questions asked, for a full refund including shipping. This was all great until they couldn’t/wouldn’t/didn’t ship it to me for a week. It turns out TigerDirect offers a similar option under the absurd name “Assurz”, and being that they’re local in Naperville I canceled with Costco and ordered from them. I placed the order at 4pm yesterday, and it’s on a truck to be delivered today. Now that is service.

Will I keep it beyond the 90 days? Maybe, maybe not. Based on less-than-stellar early performance reports on the Atom processor (which will power the Eee 901), I’m not concerned about buyer’s remorse; I’m more concerned that I’ll set it all up, tweak it for a week or two... and run out of stuff to do with it. Well, that’s what the 90-day guarantee is for.

[Update: Great, the UPS guy just delivered two Eee’s - Costco not only can’t update their order/tracking info, they also can’t cancel an order properly...]

Moving On...

...or not. As expected, I started up WoW again (couldn’t resist that baby Elek). It’s actually been fun again, due to several things:

1. •Lou is playing again, and Steph is rising in the levels
   

2. •I’ve stopped doing most daily quests, and there are so many it’s no longer the horridly competitive atmosphere it used to be
   

3. •I’m limiting my raiding to at most one every couple weeks
   

We’ll see if this keeps my free time free, or if becomes another ugly time-sink.

Ubuntu and Nimbus/VMware/Eee

I’ve continued to refine and update my process for installing VMware Tools in Ubuntu 8.04 (prompted by seeing a round-about reference in the VMware 2.0b1 release notes). It’s pretty automatic now, all the way to putting an item in your Administration menu.

Furthermore, while doing a lot of Ubuntu installs to test this, it struck me that I should document all of the tweaks I was making. After doing that, it struck me that this is a Linux, and this should all be scriptable. Sure enough, everything I’d want to tweak is available in either gconf or elsewhere, so I whipped up a metascript that configures my environment the way I like it.

All of this will be useful when the Eee arrives, as it has a lot of tweaks necessary to get the hardware up and running properly, but I just scripted those as well. It should be about as simple as my VM setup at this point.