Pumped me fulla trash, at least it smelt like trash.

Tuesday morning I knocked over my laptop and it shut down and now won't boot. OH NOES!!1! (sob) I am without my universal entertainment device and my other LJ entries from the trip! Compaq service manuals are all online and pretty good, and I have a 2.5"-to-3.5" hard disk adapter. We'll see.

Monday was a day of Nothing. I spent as much of it as possible asleep. I did discover I'd lost yet another nipple ring ball Sunday night. Tuesday we did a tiny bit of touristing, mostly fish and chips for lunch at the Duke of York and walking back along Church Street looking in shop windows and buying things. In the evening we cleaned stuff, washed clothes and called the landlady to admit we'd dyed the shower hose pink. (Problems Only Goths' Landlords Have.) Dinner was Co-op pizzas of middling mediocrity and great cheapness.

Wednesday we rose at the crack of arse again to do the dishes, give the place a once-over and pee off into town to wait for our train. Met the gaggle of Sheffgoths from the way up (Dave, Laura, their six-year-old daughter Erin who loved spending time with the Goths and thought they were all really pretty, Jay, Louise, Rob and Eleanor) and hung out with them while waiting ... on train station steps. (Hello to our Perth readers!)

We got back to Kings Cross at six and got a taxi home, to find a mountain of kitten doings left that day while sheridanwilde was out at the pictures. (Boy does this post deserve the "incoming!" icon.) arkady popped round at just the right time and has been a fantastic help. One quick zoom around, some Tough Love to the kitties and some takeout later and we're exhaling a little. I do have all of the photos from the trip now safely copied to the G4. (The card reader on the printer Just Works. You shove a card into it and it shows up as a disk. I love this printer more and more. And just using the Mac and its habit of Just Working has reduced my stress incredibly.) More later when I've given the laptop a beating. Date with Arkady scheduled for tomorrow, probably involving much beer at the Dev.

You can hear it in the valley where live the lame and the blind.

KDE comes with six or seven music players. I've been sticking with AmaroK as it doesn't piss me off as much as the others. Mind you, just getting sound to work sensibly on Leegnux is shitting me big time. Everything seems to want a different combination of ALSA, aRTs, EsounD, OSS, JACK, gstreamer, etc., etc., ad nauseam. UBUNTU IS SUPPOSED TO JUST FUCKING WORK YOU USELESS STREAK OF PISS.

Is there some magical thing I'm not doing, or do I have to wait for three or so more generations of all-'l33t all-inclusive new sound systems designed to utterly supersede the previous ones but failing to quite do so or work with your previous apps before someone finally cracks it?

(I'm not after specific help, it's the fact that anyone would have to ask for specific help that's unacceptable for something that claims it'll have a technophobe-ready distro by April. It's stupid and annoying crap that just doesn't happen on a Mac or even on fucking Windows and that the developer has no business making the end user even have to think about. The sound situation is actually worse than how goddamn weird default KDE apps look in the default GNOME Ubuntu. I'm more interested in the general state of the arse of Linux sound and if a solution is in sight before the heat death of the universe.)

Update: mjg59 points out that, obviously, supported stuff is supported and therefore KDE isn't. BUT IT STILL SUCKS! And until Rosegarden has that little Ubuntu logo next to it ...

(Mind you, given the fucking around Rosegarden requires anyway, I can hardly believe they bothered making a Debian package available.)