Happy Birthday, Geek Style
Today is my birthday, something that is almost impossible to forget nowadays due to Facebook announcing it to my entire circle of online friends. ;-)
Last year I wrote about the very nice painting that Carlos Guestrin gave me. Very cool. This year is a bit, well, geekier. My wife and son treated me to the musical theater, Spamalot, showing here in Pittsburgh this week. A pretty geeky (and fun) crowd, and the catchy (but mildly annoying) music is still going through my head. Before Spamalot, I treated myself to a new netbook, an Acer Aspire One (with the 8GB solid state drive and 1.6GHz Intel Atom processor), just $250 at newegg.com:
Of course, I couldn’t just leave it alone. I didn’t like the Fedora-based linux that it came with, so I installed Ubuntu and added the new “Netbook Remix” user interface. After flashing the BIOS to resolve some power issues, I have a remarkably nice and useful little machine for almost, well, nothing. Seems to me these cheap little machines are going to get very, very popular soon.
Peter Lee @ November 30, 2008
Hi Peter,
Belated happy birthday, and yes it’s a great little machine!
I enjoy reading your blog and thought I would mention, FYI, that Fedora open repository software (http://fedora-commons.org) is a different animal from Fedora-based linux even though “we” have used the name much longer: http://fedora-commons.org/about/history.php.
Fedora Commons is the home of the Fedora software platform that provides a robust foundation for an array of innovative solutions including open-access publishing, scholarly communication, e-science, digital libraries, archives, education, and more. Using a standards-based, service-oriented architecture, the Fedora platform provides an extensible framework of service components to support features such as OAI-PMH, search engine integration, fine-grained access control, content versioning and integrity checking, dynamic views of digital objects and formal semantic relationships among them.
All the best,
Carol Minton Morris
Happy belated birthday!
I couldn’t just leave it alone. I didn’t like the Fedora-based linux that it came with
Good choice for a netbook Peter. The Acer Aspire one has some great reviews online. For 250 bucks you just can’t go wrong.
I couldn’t just leave it alone. I didn’t like the Fedora-based linux that it came with