This has been a pretty nice cherry blossom season in DC - a little windy but warm enough that they haven’t fallen to the ground early like last year. These were down around the tidal basin, across from the Jefferson Memorial. There are some less crowded spots out around Hains Point, but there’s something about the trees around the tidal basin - the light off the water illuminates the blossoms from below I think. There’s a bus from the parking at Hains Point to the tidal basin this year, so it’s easy enough to see all the trees.

Seems like I’ve heard of a similar treatment before someplace. Sweet quote from a gastroenterologist:

“It seems remarkable that some people are prepared to be infected with worms, but the fact that they are says a lot about how poor current treatments are.”

Link to the BBC News article

I got an ASUS Eee PC when my iBook finally died. I like the little thing a lot - the tiny form factor easily makes up for the limitations.

Where the 12-inch iBook had an adequate-sized 1024×768 screen, the Eee PC’s screen is 720×400, too narrow for a lot of web pages. Zooming out can help, but I find that just makes my eyes hurt after a while. I expect ASUS will add a version with a larger screen sometime this year.

The keyboard is probably my biggest gripe. The keys are all there, but they’re a little small. With my small hands and fingers it works okay, but the iBook certainly was more comfortable for extensive typing.

The installed OS is good and bad. Good because it’s a Linux distribution, so I didn’t pay for a Windows license that I wouldn’t be using anyway. Bad because it’s Xandros and defaults to a simplified user interface. I did live with the advanced desktop mode for a while. That does offer more flexibility, but I couldn’t figure out how to keep things properly updated - counting on ASUS to update Firefox seems foolish.

Luckily, I’m not the only one underwhelmed by Xandros on the Eee PC - the EeeUser Wiki has a long list of alternative operating systems people have installed on the Eee PC. Fedora usually works for me, so I decided to try Eeedora, a live cd version of Fedora with some customizations for the Eee PC. It seems to work well enough, but there are a few things I’ve done that I’ll post about later.

Fruitcake has a reputation as an undesirable, comical holiday gift, more suitable as ammunition for a trebuchet than something to eat. To me, this is the ideal food to cook at home - however it turns out, it’ll certainly turn out better than the commercial alternative.
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Update: Well, I thought I had it working, but after several failed boots I gave up and installed Fedora 8 instead. It worked right out of the box, with the exception of the tap-click thing, right-click emulation, and the eject button. Not too bad.

I’ve got an old 12 inch dual-USB iBook that’s been running various flavors of Linux, most recently Fedora 7. That was working fine, but it seemed a little slow. Rather than upgrade to Fedora 8, I decided to try something allegedly better for older hardware. Xubuntu, a derivative of Ubuntu using the Xfce desktop environment, is supposed to be lighter-weight and faster. This is my little story about getting it running.
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