Most of the day at work was occupied by various discussions related to the sudden death of Michael Jackson today. For some, it's practically a national day of mourning. For others, it's an excuse to trot out every internet meme that's ever existed.

By the time I headed out of my office to meet up with the carpool group, I thought I'd seen it all. Then, as I get in the car, the following conversation with one of my decidedly mundane cow-orkers ensues:

Cow-orker: "You heard about Michael Jackson right?"
Me: "Yeah, I've been hearing about it all day."
Cow-orker: "Well I heard a rumor that Harrison Ford and Jeff Goldblum died too."
Me: *brief pause, followed by peals of maniacal laughter*

I had to explain the joke to her. I still don't think she quite got it.

The trip home took a little longer than usual due to some kind of traffic accident in the Posey Tube in Almeda, which required us to take the long way off the island. When I arrived home, I found a noticed posted outside main entrance to my building. It was a notice of violation from the city, citing the building owners for failing to provide heat in the building. I had actually noticed the lack of heat after I returned from my trip to LA, but I didn't really mind it because it happened to coincide with pretty nice weather here in the city. The problem with the heat is that when it's on, it's impossible to avoid: the steam radiators in the apartments can only be controlled by a shutoff valve, but the valves are so old that they've been ground down to practically nothing, making it impossible to really halt the flow of steam. I also suspect that the boiler only has a timer on it rather than a thermostat, given that it seems to come on at the same time every day, even during the summer.

According to the notice, a follow-up inspection is scheduled for next week, and each failed inspection will cost the landlord $170. This doesn't strike me as a terribly stiff penalty.

I noticed that Pidgin started having trouble with Y! Messenger again recently. It seems that Yahoo has once again jiggered their authentication servers, possibly in an attempt to force people to upgrade their clients. Luckily, there's already a new version of Pidgin available to fix this. I upgraded my setup at work an it's happy now, but I'm going to have to rebuild it on my home machine and my laptop too. Joy.

Last weekend was Gothnic 2009. Much fun, food and sun (booooo! hisssssss!) was had by all. I saw many people that I hadn't seen in a long while, which was nice even though it made me feel even more like an old fart. I even managed to drag Ceren out of her hermitage. Damion should consider this an organizational success, even though he may insist that he has all the organization skills of a pack of retarded gerbils. Luckily, with a group like us, who basically _are_ a pack of retarded gerbils, you don't really need much more.

Work has been eating my brains more vigorously than usual. The Intel merger/acquisition hasn't been finalized yet, so things are still mostly business as usual, though there's definitely an undercurrent of anxiety. I've been too busy to really think about it, but I know that in other departments there's been no shortage of gossip. For one thing, since we will now be part of Intel's accounting process, there's some question as to what will happen to our own finance and accounting people. As for me, I had just enough time after getting back from my first furlough week to finish up my latest project before having to take another one next week. I'm still not sure what I'm going to do with the time, but I did decide that I don't want to go to to Toorcamp. (Hey, Graziela, are you doing anything next week? *poke* *poke*)

My trip to LA was fairly relaxing. I stayed with Pixel again, and he hosted a party for his friend Amber the Saturday after I arrived. There were balloons, toys and snacks (the latter of which produced a photo labeled "two girls, one cupcake"). I also met this really cute girl who does some kind of database programming who, given my luck, I'll probably never see again. (And if I do, I'm sure she'll introduce me to her boyfriend.) I also got a chance to futz around with Pixel's brand new HP 2140 Netbook. Since he was going to trash the factory Windows install put Linux on it, he let me try it out with FreeBSD 7.2, since I happened to have the CD with me. The 2140 has Broadcom wifi and Marvell ethernet. Neither one worked exactly out of the box, but did work eventually with some coercion. The Broadcom wireless required Project Evil. For the ethernet, I had to grab the latest msk(4) driver from FreeBSD-current. It has Intel graphics, which did work out of the box with Xorg. So did the sound and bluetooth. I didn't do anything with the built-in camera. Unfortunately, video is one of FreeBSD's perennial weaknesses: Linux has a framework for it, but FreeBSD doesn't, so all camera drivers are pretty much ad-hoc.

The one thing I was really curious about was whether or not the Intel Atom processor in the 2140 is actually faster than the Celeron M in my existing laptop. The Atom has a higher clock speed, but from my experiments there didn't seem to be a huge difference in response and performance.

Oh, we also ran into some of HP's stupidity. Pixel wanted to replace the internal Broadcom wifi adapter with an Atheros one, for various sundry reasons. First of all, HP designed the laptop so that you have to take it completely apart in order to remove the wifi module. And I mean _completely_. Second, after going to all that trouble and reassembling the whole thing, we turned it on only to be greeted by a BIOS error telling us that an unsupported piece of hardware was installed, and that we had to remove the offending device in order to successfully boot. It turns out HP rigged the BIOS to check the PCI vendor/device ID on the wifi card, and it won't start the system up if you don't have a "supported" one. So we had to disassemble the laptop all over again to put it back the way it was.

I hope a lot of people complain to HP about this, though something tells me they probably won't, which is a shame. I'm still on the fence about getting an Atom-based netbook. I kinda want one, but can't really justify it while my existing laptop is still fully functional. Ah well, they'll still be out there if I change my mind.