Gortbusters.org's Journal: Girlfriend moves to OSX, Sopranos comment, I go Gentoo

A few items:

My gf, after using Linux RH9+XD2 for a couple weeks, ultimately went to Mac OSX. I bought her the 17" iMAC. The 20" was tempting, but my wallet was already screaming in pain when I decided to go for the 17.

We caught the season finale of Sopranos last night. Let me tell you -- they really like to put in little side plots. Many of them go nowhere and many of them just twist the main plot line. Perfect example is the climax of this season. Tony's cousin could have easily started a massive mafia war, but at each time it could have exploded into gun fire, it didn't. Watching the last episode, they were about to cop out with paying off the vendeta, but then one of those small plot twists got most of the NY people arrested -- who knew!

Finally, I tried upgrading my old laptop (which had rh9+xd2) to Fedora. RH9->FC1 worked okay (few minor errors, few package removals to make yum work), but then FC1->FC2 bombed (rpm and DB became incomaptible). Instead of spending a week in dependency/compiling hell, I decided to spend a week in compiling Gentoo bliss! The result is that my old clunker laptop feels like brand new, everything runs so fast now that it's optimized.

Compile time notes on this P4M 1.7ghz laptop with 1GB ram:
- Basic system setup: 1 night
- Gnome: 1 night
- Mozilla: 5 hours
- OpenOffice: 10 hours

Overall, the install was fun -- been a long time since I fooled around with the guts of a distribution, but the fooling around ends and you do get a stable system.