Signifying Nothing: how does saying nothing at all become so loud?

Take my love, take my land, whatever; just give me my Serenity

To borrow a phrase from another Sci-Fi series, wa-HOOO! But, yeah, I’d like the TV show back too…

Weird pickup attempt of the week

A recent addition to SN‘s blogroll is the self-described Hot Abercrombie Chick!, Amanda. She seems to attract very weird commenters. She also received this email, which is just downright odd… but, since I’m bored, I’ll put my limited matchmaking skills to work to fulfill this gentleman’s request.

How I learned to stop loving Paul Krugman

Here’s the punchline from Steve Verdon:

I used to have quite a bit of respect for Krugman. Now I see him as a despicable, low-life, partisan jackass.

Read the whole thing for the rest. It’s pretty sad.

Dopey Yaleites go on a road trip

My theory about the history of the South is that every Southerner doesn’t know anything that happened before 1980 (except Sherman’s march to the sea) and every Northerner doesn’t know anything that happened since 1954 (except a bunch of blacks getting blasted with fire hoses). For the former, I rely on interactions with Ole Miss students; for the latter, I rely on this Yale Daily News piece, which contains the following quote:

“Tennessee has southern hospitality and a southern feel without having the antagonism of the deep South,” Elizabeth Dohrmann ‘06 of Nashville said. “Everything is so alive and the culture is still intact, but it’s probably one of the easiest places to visit in the South.”

One suspects Ms. Dohrmann’s experience of the South—a region that Nashville is about as much a part of as Seattle is—is limited to a viewing of Sling Blade and vague familiarity with the plots of Deliverance and Mississippi Burning. One also suspects Ms. Dohrmann’s knowledge of Memphis—a city that combines the best and worst of the deep South in one not-so-tidy community—is limited to knowledge that her beloved Tennessee Titans played a season in a shitty stadium in said city.

As for the alleged “antagonism of the deep South,” I’d rise to the defense of the region except I’m running late for my Meetup with Acidman and a few pals from the CCC.*

The new laptop

Since I really don’t have much to add to any of the current political discussion (Stern versus the FCC, Bush’s campaign advertising—hey, it’s 1992 all over again!), and I’m running out of time to meet my “one post per GMT day quota,” I figured I’d talk a little about my new laptop—inspired in part by Michael Jennings’ blogging about his.

My new laptop, an HP Pavilion zt3010US, is a bit lower-end than Michael’s, although pretty close to the top of the line for what you can get at a mass retailer like Best Buy. Superficially, it strongly resembles the Compaq Presario laptop I bought a couple of years ago and passed on to my dad—while all the screen printing is HP stuff, the keyboard has the exact feel the Presario did. Of course, all these things are made by OEMs in mainland China anyway, but this is clearly part of the HP-Compaq synergy. As Brock noted when I talked with him about the machine, the Pavilion name used to be damaged goods, on the order of the well-deserved ignomony conferred on Packard Bell PCs.

Like Michael’s machine, it’s most distinguishing feature is the widescreen display; the resolution is “only” 1280×800, but it’s still larger than any laptop I’ve ever owned… and it’s a better display than any LCD I’ve ever used, including my desktop Samsung 1280×1024 LCD. Under the hood, it’s a full-blown Centrino: a 1.5 GHz Pentium M CPU with Intel’s 2100 wireless chipset, boring Intel AC’97 audio, and a fairly slick ATI Mobile Radeon 9200 graphics card (slicker than the Radeon 8500DV in my PC). Actually, everything about it is slicker than my desktop PC.

HP skimped on including an external floppy drive—although I still have the USB floppy drive that came with the Toshiba junker that this replaced—but it compensates nicely with a DVD+RW/CD-RW combo drive. 3 USB 2.0 ports, a legacy parallel port (omitted on the Toshiba), VGA and S-Video out, softmodem, and wired 10/100 Ethernet are also included. The only real misfeature is that only one PCMCIA slot is included, instead of the two that are typical on most laptops.

The Toshiba, which was a poorly-engineered piece of garbage based on an underclocked desktop Pentium III chip, sucked battery like nobody’s business—you were lucky to get two hours of battery life out of it. So far, it looks like the HP will do at least 3 hrs under light load, in part thanks to the low-power Centrino setup.

Everything about the machine is fast. The 60GB hard drive seems zippier than my desktop drives. Package upgrades under Debian are wicked fast.

The only downsides I’ve seen so far: the Centrino wireless is only supported under Linux via ndiswrapper, and the software support for the CPU frequency scaling and the like—as is typical with Debian—is “you have to track down the packages you need yourself.” (I guess we need to work on that.)

« All done!

Friday, 5 March 2004

Take my love, take my land, whatever; just give me my Serenity

Weird pickup attempt of the week

How I learned to stop loving Paul Krugman

Dopey Yaleites go on a road trip

The new laptop