Oh yer! Yer! What a wonderful life! Fats Domino on the radio!

[reddragdiva]

No Alf alarm clocks today — the broken laptop I was particularly chasing was driven up by a coupla n00bs. Next time.

However, I have found the Fountain of Gadgetry: Guangdong Province. Every cheap gadget you see sold anywhere really is made in Shanghai and environs and will show up here in about three months. But you can order them by the hundred right now: a dog-shaped webcam (or anything else), a USB ashtray, a selection of goth-proof keyboards, a pocket recording of the Qu'ran (indexed by verse and surah), an MP3 bear or something that claims to be an MP3 camera but looks like a UFO. Don't forget to get me one of these, these or these, please.

In a vastly successful turn of fate, I have both Soulseek and Exact Audio Copy working just fine under Wine 0.9.10. (Hit F9 and set Interface to "Native Win32 interface" for EAC to see the CD-ROM.) I'm shocked and pleased — stuff mostly works, as opposed to mostly not working. It's actually a beta, not an alpha. Having WinSCP is nice too; it's always been my preferred scp/sftp client by far. So it seems I don't actually have anything I have to use VMWare for. Which means I can put this system back on wifi as absolutely soon as possible.

(The sticking point for a lot of people in getting off Windows isn't major apps at all — they're an easy target — but the million and one bits of semi-custom crapware that will never, ever be ported even if the programmer can be found and can still find the source code. arkady just Win2k'd her new laptop specifically for such custom crapware, knowing damn well Windows will start showing signs of decay in a few months ... I'll be testing it all under Wine 0.9.10.)

redcountess has been remarkably ill, and we will almost certainly have to cancel our visit to Lanzarote for gothicbarbiecat's birthday in April. Arse. But today she has been crocheting dollie clothes and can finally see what on Earth the pattern maker was getting at. And dollie-enabling Arkady, who has just adopted yet another poor lost resin child and has been working out her next photo story (see arkadiandreams) and making the outfits for it.

I'm still wishing I could breathe well enough to ruin it with cigarettes. (No, I'm not going to.) Arse.

Tomorrow I post a cheque for the camera and look for w*rk.