Present Perfect

Here's my first entry for the GNOME cookbook.

(note, this is a serious entry, even though its awesome simplicity may make you believe otherwise)

 Nuke'm cheese toast

Ingredients: toastable bread, cheese slices

1. Toast a slice of bread, preferably white.

Try to avoid bread that comes out of plastic bags.

2. While the bread is toasting, trim the edge off the cheese slices. A good cheese to use is Gouda.

3. Put toasted bread on a plate and put cheese slice on top.

4. Microwave at 700W for 30 seconds. Assert that cheese has started making tiny bubbles and is melting slightly through the bread.

5. Ignore the smell and enjoy the taste.

I used to make this all the time when I wanted a quick snack to keep up the hacking when I was living in Belgium. I stopped doing it here in Spain because it's hard to find decent bread. I made one again at Kristien's place in Brussels last month after three years without having one, and it was so incredibly awesome I had six on the spot.

I will come up with a more elaborate recipe I like but I have some trouble picking one.

Incidentally, I think it would be better to have a longer collection period for recipes - apparently it's being closed off in two weeks ? There aren't enough hackers who have contributed yet, Don't let this be a Federico-cooks-with-a-very-small-bit-of-help-from-friends book (even though every time he writes about cooking he makes my mouth water :))

Happy Cooking

Here's my first entry for the GNOME cookbook. (note, this is a serious entry, even though its awesome simplicity may make you believe otherwise)  Nuke'm cheese toast Ingredients: toastable bread,...

I was gearing up for buying two 750 GB drives, put them in software RAID, and then re-encode all my CD's to FLAC instead of Ogg like they are now.

I want to use FLAC so I have a perfect copy stored, and from that I can regenerate whatever I want for whatever other situation.   I used to have everything in Ogg, but with my Nokia 800 and Kristien's iPod that's just not the most useful format to have.

I figure I should be able to store around 1700 CD's on there, which is about 400 more than I currently have.

Except that now it seems there are 1TB drives available, for 50% more money than the 750GB ones.  So not exactly at the sweet spot, but not that unreasonable either... And by now I have so many old hard drives lying around collecting dust that I've come back a little on always buying at the lowest dollar/GB price.

Sigh, decisions! Please vote in the comments.

I was gearing up for buying two 750 GB drives, put them in software RAID, and then re-encode all my CD's to FLAC instead of Ogg like they are now....

I type duck all the time.  It makes me feel pythonic.

I type duck all the time.  It makes me feel pythonic.

Greetings fellow Thinkpad fans in Europe,

please share with me how you recently were able to buy a Lenovo Thinkpad. Did you order from the US site directly ? Did you find a local dealer ?

I am getting thoroughly confused by the Spanish dealers that carry Lenovo. They keep coming up with models that don't match my relatively simple request (T series, no widescreen, 14 inch, Intel graphics chip) or trying to sell me a Dell. They claim that Lenovo Spain can only get widescreen and no faster CPU than 2 GHz.

The site is getting a bit confusing for me too - are there actually any non-widescreen T61 laptops ? I would think that if it says WXGA it would be widescreen, and normal if it's XGA, but I can't be sure.

Really Lenovo, why can't I just directly customize on your site a laptop I want, and your organization takes care of shipping it through one of your dealers so I can just drop by and collect the damn thing ? It's like you don't even want money.

Greetings fellow Thinkpad fans in Europe, please share with me how you recently were able to buy a Lenovo Thinkpad. Did you order from the US site directly ? Did...

It feels good to get on top of my TODO list and take back control over my life one task at a time.  I finally got round to finding out what Getting Things Done is all about (stop yawning in the back there) and it seems to help me much more than the ad-hoc methods I've used before.

I think the reason  it works so well for me up to now is that the book actually explains *why* simple time   management systems fail.  The book takes the time to explain this and this resonates with my experience.  For example, lots of tasks can indeed be done within 2 minutes.

Keeping your INBOX completely clean and moving things out that are in fact action items to do later is a lot better than having them sit around in your INBOX  (broken window theory at play again).  And the idea of contexts (I feel tired, give me some phone calls to make) is so natural I wonder why I didn't think of it myself.

Getting tasks outside of your head and into a system helps wonders to sleep at night and not lie awake thinking about stuff to do.  I should put a notebook by my bed though.

It was going well before my two week tour of Europe (task on my todo list to BlogAboutIt), achieving zero mail INBOXes at the end of the day.  And it only took me three days to catch up again after two weeks of only skimming them.  A great feeling to be able to go to bed with all your open loops captured.

God, I'm prodporning.

The only thing I'm trying to avoid really hard is rewriting this python-based GTD tool I'm using, and slapping a GUI on top of it.  Really, I don't need more tasks.

It feels good to get on top of my TODO list and take back control over my life one task at a time.  I finally got round to finding out...