The waters of her dream are black and forgetful. I'd like to make them clean.

• Bugger me, that's a good price. That's the model up from the one I lost. And this price is even better. Has anyone here ever dealt with either of these companies?

For my first day at work, I think I actually frightened my boss by showing up in the nice suit and tie. Tomorrow will be normal clothes.

The morning was spent on an overview of the systems and the afternoon on setting up NetApp snapshots of the new Oracle server for backup. Let's start at the deep end, shall we? By the way: if you don't want to get back rcmd: netapp1: short read when you try to rsh to the NetApp^*, it helps if hosts on the NetApp has the IP for the Oracle server that matches the interface said Oracle server is connected to it by. Ahem.

I enjoyed today the way I enjoyed my first few months at Ericsson (before the company started haemorrhaging red ink and cutting limbs off to survive): doing actual systems administration and building things that work. I never actually did enjoy my time at the recently-past job in this way, as every step of it was fucked up by the politics of working face to face with a stroppy customer who didn't know what they wanted. In a suit and tie.

It was also nice not spending my first three days having to read LiveJournal to pass the torturous minutes. Tomorrow we visit the colo!

Oh, and work will be paying my DSL bill. And giving me ... a laptop.

* rsh is quite sufficiently secure for these purposes if the one entry in hosts.equiv is the one server that's allowed to talk to it, with the two directly connected on their own subnet consisting of the Ethernet cable between them.

Constant in opal.

I've installed Debian testing on my Thinkpad 560X. Spent a few days beating it around, filing a bug, installing packages piecemeal and cursing its Unixlike nature — insofar as it's as luxurious as a bare-metal Land Rover and the only comfort is what you bolt on by hand, probably including seats and suspension.

However, it is L*n*x and so can run the network card and probably the sound system. And Debian does seem at least semicoherent. I am posting from it right now, and my goodness Firefox looks odd with twm. I must investigate WiFi drivers. x11vnc is also very tempting.

(Question: I set it up with a FAT32 partition first and ext3 second. Can I use parted to merge the FAT32 space into the ext3 partition without fucking it up? Also, is there a package of laptop goodies, such as power management?)

Update: And in further happy news, my laptop's battery now appears to hold a charge! I'll be doing some reliability tests, of course ...