My aged and broken laptop is still broken and has not grown any younger. Moreover, the USB key on which I had a decently recent backup of my work appears to have died as well. Furthermoreover, the server on which I also had my work backed up is suffering from a bum RAID array. Mission for today is to extract the drive from the old laptop and wire it directly into the dilithium recrystallization coils — er, I mean, connect it to my new Sony VAIO C420. I note that Micro Center sold me a laptop with Windows Vista on it, but I forgive them, since Ubuntu gutsy (the installation disc I had on hand) installed without any trouble. Audio, wireless and all those goodies worked without extra effort; I haven’t yet had much success with the Bluetooth support it automagically detected, but the only device I’ve had to test it with has been a cell phone which doesn’t play well with anything else, either. I found a status-bar tool which displays the current weather conditions as reported on the Intertubes, and unlike the previous version I’d used, this one can display temperature in kelvins. A year in Lyon followed by a change to my laptop settings went a long way to making me “internally metric”; this may be the logical next step.

(By the way, I booted into Vista just once — so I could say I knew the enemy, and all — and it sucked. It took the duration of an entire Pinky and the Brain episode just to decide how best to phone in to the mothership and report the music library I hadn’t yet put on the blasted thing because I’d just taken it out of the box. Neil Gaiman was right to consider XP an upgrade.)

All that aside, it is now Friday afternoon in Cambridge, Mass. (which is across and down the river from Newton, Mass. — there’s gotta be a physics joke in that). Outside, it’s a partly cloudy 302 kelvins. Inside, it’s time for the Dandy Warhols, with “I am a Scientist.”

Incidentally, we like to have music playing while we cook dinner here at Château Sunclipse, and this was the song we had going when we discovered that enchilada sauce with a dash of hoisin made an excellent base for beef soup.