I'm in Trouble Now

My local Domino's now offers on-line ordering. (I put in order #14 yesterday.) Their "pizza tracking" (think UPS/FedEx tracking, for pizza) didn't work though.

It's an Epiphany!

Or at least, that's the default web browser that comes with GNOME these days.

Yes, my new laptop (after the last one, I spent the extra $20 or whatever to get the super-long-life-battery) is now dual-booted in WinXP and Debian 4. At first, Debian couldn't understand the graphics card or the built-in wireless jobbie. I still haven't figured out the wireless yet, but that's because I haven't tried, since I still have a wire. It took quite a bit of mess to get the graphics driver installed (apparently they haven't yet got a precompiled version for Linux 2.6, or something, so I had to compile it myself, which required having the kernel source code installed. And for whatever reason, aptitude never installed things the first time around -- I never did get the hang of it).

And better yet, I've been working on this battery since 2 o'clock or so, and it's now 5; and it says it's still at half full and good for another 2.5 hours. When you consider that my previous laptop lasted 25 minutes at full charge, well, I'm already giddy.

UPDATE Sunday afternoon: Wireless working, and I think I've got it set up to always turn on. (I know, typing one whole command each time is a heck of a pain.) The sound was easier than I expected, since they've got a tool for that now. And I've got my Windows data mounted (read-only, but that's ok; I've got the Linux side read-only under Windows too). It took 135 minutes or so to get most of my files from old laptop yesterday.

Puzzles

I did another crostic today, which is posted in the puzzles place. There's one answer that I think is a little iffy, but. I also updated my perl script for automatically generating the grids, getting rid of all the appearances of the magic number 19 (it is now the variable $boxesPerRow), and at the same time changed its value to 21 (a wider grid fitting the layout I print them with). I also (I hope!) finalized my LaTeX template for making the puzzle pages (both in terms of the font selection and the layout). There's still some copy-and-pasting going on; the perl script doesn't know anything about how much space the clues will take on the page, so the column split is done by hand. So all that's posted for anyone to look at (should anyone want to, which I can't think who that would be).

I did that partly as practice, as my arm was starting to ache after five or so puzzles in the book. It appears to have helped, as I'm feeling pretty good about a time of 10:45; especially since I'm pretty sure Stella&Bruce (I'm ashamed to admit I've forgotten which one does the fill--I think Bruce? but I don't remember) made a couple of those words up.

It Is On

I have my plane ticket to StamfordBrooklyn, and my hotel room reserved. Eventually, I will actually register for the ACPT, but they're not taking registrations yet?

Saturday-levels are still my downfall; the left side of today's NYT just wasn't working and required a couple look-this-up. Plus yesterday's ONTHELOOSE/ONTHEHOUSE (for the clue "Free" -- spoiler! Oh.) debacle didn't help, but at least I got there by myself, even if five minutes off the pace.

Fortunately, I have 490 Sunday puzzles to do still, out of the Supersized Sunday collection. (I had made a vow to myself that, except for Merl, I would never buy puzzle books that weren't spiral-bound. Of course, I can't hold my family to that for Christmas. Fortunately, my good Parker pen only needs a light touch, making it possible to do puzzle #4, for instance, which sits a good three inches off the table when you're doing it.)

A Man With One Novelty Clock Knows What Time It Is

A man with two novelty clocks is never sure. (Although so far they agree.)