Linux is always an adventure. My iBook is starting to show it's age and I had to bring it in for physical repairs
(on day 1,050 out of 1095 of the warranty), so I'm using my 2001 college desktop-now-frankenstein-Linux machine.

What I love about getting "up to your elbows" in a computer's workings is how a simple measure can delightfully exponentiate into ridiculousness. "Oh, the clock is off by 7 minutes" turned into "why doesn't java work?" turned into rooting around in root to figure out how to get it right... long story short, in what should have been a 10-second adjustment (checking time.gov and resetting the clock) turned into a 20-minute exploration of getting stuff to work in Ubuntu. Rarely do I ever turn off this machine without having felt that I learned something about Unix.

A bit busy today (with god knows what....) I hope that I'll update on this soon!


PS-- while I look for a new laptop, does anyone have any suggestions?