When we came home from taking the girls out trick-or-treating, I noticed that something seemed off with one of our cars. The window was rolled all the way down, and upon closer inspection, the door wasn’t shut completely.

That’s strange, I thought.

I looked in and though it did appear to me as if someone had been inside, nothing seemed to be missing, so I rolled the window up, locked it up, and forgot about it. The next evening Bruce headed out for his night class and couldn’t get his key in the ignition. He said there was glue and toothpicks in it. Usually when we park on the street we lock it, but once in a while I don’t, and “mischief night” was obviously not the best night to forget to lock down our stuff.

Anyway, it turned out it was actually a broken off key in there, not glue. This was good because a guy from AAA was actually able to pick it out, instead of us paying our mechanic hundreds of dollars to drill the entire ignition out, and possibly screwing up other things in the process. But bad because I guess that means some kids were actually trying to steal our car.

Good thing they didn’t find the spare key we keep on it.

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I’ve had IC problems almost every night since Halloween. It’s not a big mystery why. Bruce finally took 2/3rds of the stupid Halloween candy to work, mostly the chocolate stuff, which was the worst offender. The girls don’t seem to remember or notice the sheer volume they had initially, so this is fine. It’s not really good for them either. Damn you, Hershey.

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I’ve been experimenting with Linux for the first time since my failed attempt with Corel Linux so many years ago. Corel and Ubuntu are worlds apart, and I’m so glad things have progressed beyond what I saw in Corel Linux. It was terrible. Ubuntu is easily ten times more user-friendly. It’s so user-friendly, I could almost picture somebody’s Grandma being able to use it for letters and email. Beyond these basics it could get scary. Despite the pretty window-dressing, Linux is still not for the faint of heart. This is why I am stepping gingerly around it and trying things out carefully before making too many commitments with it. I don’t even understand the Linux filesystem yet–it seems to scatter files everywhere. That is a carryover “feature” from Unix that I could do without, but I certainly like the Mac feel of Ubuntu. So far I have it installed as the sole OS on the twin computer, Bruce’s old 900mhz eMachine, and it runs a lot faster than Windows XP ever did. The twins are big fans of the Potatohead game and TuxPaint (I was thrilled to see there’s a Windows version as well). And since they often want to do it at the same time, I attempted another install on my laptop yesterday, as a dual-boot scenario. It went well, but it didn’t quite partition the way I liked so I had to reformat the whole thing and start over. I like the little slider to help you partition the drive when you’re installing Ubuntu for a dual-boot, but you know, it would be even nicer if they told you which OS is going to get which part when you’re sliding it around (hello?).

Anyway, that and a new web design job is what’s been keeping me busy. I’m also collecting various junked computer parts from around town in hopes of building a serviceable frankencomputer for a friend of mine the holidays. So if you have any old computer crap laying around collecting dust, hey! You know who to call.

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Links!
SuperViva
Bypass the stupid Windows Genuine Advantage validation
Ask Ms. Dewey (this is pretty cool)
PhishTank - you can submit your suspected phish attempts here
Clearification - you might recognize this guy from the Daily Show