the trials...

so a while back i signed up for google's pilot program for their netbooks that they're planning (as far as i know) on putting out in the wild.
the deal was, you sign up for their netbook and then use it, abuse it, break it and generally have a daily life with it.
so...for promising to do that, certain select lucky people got a free netbook out of the deal. i just happened to be one of them :-D

the story of how i got it was fairly (though not at the time) amusing.
i'd subbed that day in L's class and it was just a long day. not a bad one just long.so we get ready to leave and head out to the car and start to back up and somethin just isn't right. so i get out of the car and the front drivers side tire has developed a side. so, here i am. in the parking lot of the school in my fairly nice work clothes trying to change a damned tire. in the snow. i wasn't happy.
so...i finally get the spare on there. we made it roughly 300 yards (if that) before the fucking thing went flat. yup. i was happy.
so we drove on the flat spare up to the local convenience store where we basically sat there and did nothing. so L called her mom, who luckily was in town, and had her come pick us up.
so we went to walmart to get the new tire put on the car. the guy informed us that they weren't taking any more tires that night.
we informed him that yeah, he was taking another tire that night. it was a single tire. takes like 20 minutes to fix if that.
the guy told us it'd be an hour and a half to a 2 hour wait.
so...we took L's mom out to dinner. which was nice.
so, we made it back to walmart to find that they were done with out tire. so we throw it in the back of L's mom's blazer and head back toward git-n-go and here i go changing another tire, in my nice clothes, in a parking lot in the snow.
so by this point i'm fairly fucking grumpy.
so we FINALLY made it home and there's a box on the front porch. i looked at L and asked if she'd ordered something on accident again (a different long story) and she asked me if i'd ordered something e-cig like.
well, neither of us had ordered anything, so we brought the box inside.
while listening for sounds of ticking, i ripped the box open to find a little computer. could not figure out where the hell i was getting a computer from. then i pulled the (scant) documentation out of the box and just about had a cow.
i had almost completely forgotten that i'd signed up for one. i had a vague memory of it from someone else in the general area posting on their blog that they'd received one. which led me to think "oh, hey. i signed up for that too."
so i sat down and played with the netbook for about 20 minutes. then i pretty much said screw this i'm going to bed.
wake up the next morning like a kid at christmas and go to play with the netbook. it works great! for about 20 minutes.
then i got kicked off the network at the house. now, my routers are a little funky at times so i didn't think to much about it. till i restarted the router and waited for 15 minutes for it to reconnect.
wouldn't do it.
at.
all.
so, i spent a good chunk of the  of the day trying to get the netbook to do something. this is how the netbook acquired the name "Dave". because every time i tried to get it to do something i could just hear it in my head saying "i'm sorry dave, i don't think i can do that."
so. i putzed around and got frustrated and finally put it in developer mode and managed to get some sort of useful information about his hardware from him.
turns out the wifi card had gone tits up.
after some serious part number googling, i finally found out what wifi card he had and checked ebay.
$13 part from china, week and a half for it to get here, find the right screwdriver and presto! dave is alive!!!

so, i'm posting this from dave. i'm going to be giving the wonderful google cr-48 a pretty good run through. including being used for school and things like that.
i am however going to buy a fucking mouse and disable the trackpad. AARGH!!!
trackpads make me RAEG HAET!!!!!

anyway. there's the story of dave the netbook. so far i'm seriously diggin it. the screen is good. the keyboard is fucking awesome. i may wind up putting more ram in at some point, but i'm not really sure that i'll need to. i'll reserve that for later after i've put it through it's paces a bit.

so yeah. the first post with dave is done. i'll shut up now.

...

holy shit! it's been forever since i wrote anything.

ewps.
i really should know better.

i guess there really hasn't been much going on lately? i took the last semester of school off.
this doesn't really mean much other than that i don't skip classes and i don't leave the house as much.
i suppose the not skipping class part is probably a good thing. i do miss the comfy couches in the hallway though :-D

it's starting to get warmer out. this makes me happy. now if it'd just stay consistently warmer that'd be nice.
but i think it's time to put the clipless pedals on my bike and start heading out into the wild.
i don't really have anywhere to go, but hey. that'll make getting there interesting.

past that i've been working (a little) as a sub. i SO love subbing in L's class. those kids are just freakin amazing. and NO ONE (other than the teachers) realizes just how much they do. it's amazing to watch.
i had the brain drizzle one morning to build a website so that the parents would have some idea of what heir kids did each day. put up a picture gallery and some posts and a class schedule.

wow did it turn into more than that. building the website for the class so that the parents can see what's going on has been a blast. there's a gallery of daily happenings. L has been taking movies like mad with her phone for me to upload to the site.
there is a full fledged picture gallery up. well, ok it'll be more full fledged when i get the rest of the damned pictures up.
there is a movie gallery going up as we speak.

weatherman bob hates me, but hey...he's young. it's to be expected.
ok, weatherman bob is the dress up doll that is being created for the site. going along the lines of the paper doll dress up sites, i decided to make weatherman bob. he's a little guy that'll be on the site that will have the dress up clothes so that the kids can dress him up according to what the day's weather is supposed to be like. so if it's raining they can put his raincoat and umbrella on, or a t-shirt and shorts if it's nice and warm...stuff like that.
the shit part of it is that i'm trying to learn flash/actionscript on the fly. which is part of the reason wm bob hates me right now.
meh. i'll get somethin worked out. :-) i usually do.

one of the parts i'm excited about (that no one seems to know is there yet) is the user forum where the parents can interact with each other and with L and MizzDee.
i'm really hoping that that starts getting used.

anyway...that's about all that's up. i'm having a slightly manic day (but at least it's a happy'ish manic and not a pissed off manic) so...we'll see how much i can get done today.