shinyPlasticBag

Hey-o, I’m without a computer again. How shitty is that? Life resumed suckiness on Tuesday afternoon, when a big yellow taxi took my laptop away. Don’t it always seem to go that you don’t know what you’ve got til it’s gone? Actually, it was a big white Purolator truck. And by the way, the woman who I dealt with on the phone at Purolator was a real bitch.

Fortunately, Mom’s computer (Gwen) is a much better substitute this time around. I spend a big chunk of Tuesday fixing it up for her so it would run all nice and smooth. I installed MobyDock, the latest version of Firefox, and Thunderbird. I installed matching themes on both of them, and set up a Gmail account for her. I got some trendy wallpapers and used Foood’s icons to make her dock look very cool. And then I made a custom screensaver for her using some neat images from Google Images and The Stock Exchange. Anyway, I’ve got a screenshot of her desktop (800×600 — ugh) if anyone wants to see how ludicrously trendy it is. I really like MobyDock, and I’ll be doing something like this to Megapixel when she returns.

(The following is from sometime late Tuesday night, and it’s incredibly geeky).

Things that are REALLY hard to do (even if you’re a geek): installing a web browser when you don’t have one. On a command-line only copy of FreeBSD. Yep, I came downstairs to cruise around a bit and get used to Lynx again, since Megapixel will be gone for a while. That was when I remembered that I don’t have it anymore, since the hard drive in the server died and I never reinstalled it. After thinking for a while about how on earth I could possibly get it, I came up with a solution.

You see, FreeBSD has this really handy fetch command. You give fetch an address, and it will download that file. That’d be great if I knew the exact address to get Lynx, but I didn’t. But, I am a crafty bastard. I started out simple: fetch http://lynx.browser.org/index.html. That would download the Lynx web site and I could read it with a text editor. No luck — not the official site anymore. I couldn’t imagine using Google this way, so I tried a simpler method: fetch http://a9.com/lynx%20browser. That worked great, although their code was almost impossible to read. From then on it, it was a breeze. I got the address for the official site, and painstakingly navigated page by page, until I found it. And now, it’s downloading. Sheesh, I’m lucky I have nothing useful to store in my head.

(I just remembered that Torch, the Dalhousie undergraduate server, has lynx installed. I could have used that. ARG.)