Bounded in a Nutshell

I miss the word "failure". It was a fixture in the vernacular of my youth, by which I mean the social circles that I moved in as an undergraduate; the full phrase took the form "failure to X", sometimes followed by "penalty card". (The formula comes from a particularly aggravating card game that was designed to appeal specifically to geek of a certain stripe. Even today, I can not tell you its name… not because I don't know it, but because to do so would land me with three penalty cards in quick succession, and who can afford to carry around all those extra cards these days?)

Today, of course, the use of "failure" is becoming deprecated as "FAIL" is taking on extra duties as a noun. While I appreciate the broader punning potential of the shorter word – I'm fond of "failboat", for instance – I miss the comparative prolixity of the original.

There's a guy from the phone company in my basement right now, installing the various folderol necessary for my incipient transition to fibre-optics-based service ("FiOS", to use the brand name). It feels a little weird, because it's really quite rare for there to be anyone else in my house; I think the last time I had a visitor was six months ago. It's also weird because of the random drilling and hammering noises that keep phasing in and out, of course.

In other news, I've got my new machine; pursuant to my earlier musings, I'm indeed going with the three-box solution of a desktop, a laptop, and an iPod Touch, though the latter has yet to arrive. So far, I'm liking the desktop a lot; I'd forgotten what having adequate amounts of RAM really means.

Oh, and I've been experimenting with Twitter, which is more fun than I'd anticipated. The username there's "doc_hatter" if you feel like following my exploits there. I've started working on another couple of web-based projects, but it might be a while before those come to fruition.

The English football league system. The shrunken font as one descends the levels of the pyramid is a nice touch.

Public transportation in my city that's still running after my night class ends.

The College Democrats on my campus are having an organizational meeting this week; they've got signs up around my building. They follow a "What/When/Where" sort of format that's not uncommon for student organizations, and the "Who" is listed as "Everyone Alive*"... with a footnote in tiny print.

I'd figured that the footnote would be some self-deprecating reference to Chicago machine politics of fifty years ago... because in my head, I expect to live in a world where people make those kinds of jokes in passing. Instead, the footnote read:

zombies will be killed. sorry zombies.

Which kind of made my day, I admit.

My laptop is nearing the end of its three-year extended warranty, which is more or less equivalent to the end of its three-year lifespan from what people have told me. The battery's reached the point where it'll last for thirty minutes unplugged, tops, which is just unacceptable. So I'm considering my options.

Option A is to just go and get a new laptop, essentially continuing my current computational lifestyle. This is in some ways the simpler option.

Option B is to get a desktop and a new battery. This would involve making the desktop my primary computer, and stripping down the laptop and making it pretty much a travelling-only machine. This has its attractions, in that desktops tend to be more powerful than laptops at an equivalent price point, and any new laptop I got would be larger than the one that I've got right now... and I rather like the size of my current machine for portability.

In either case, I'm not likely to move on it for another couple of weeks; having just gotten a major repair done on my car, I'd kind of like to wait for the next billing cycle to start before making another large purchase.