Gregory Szorc's blog

Computer Foo

The weather was unusually sketchy yesterday, which forced me inside for the first Saturday since I bought my bicycle. As I still don't have a TV, I spent a good part of the day hacking around. Here are some random highlights:

• The Thunderbird 2.0 release candidate is great! It looks considerably better than 1.5. Perhaps I am blind, but it still doesn't have "virtual folders" or enhanced tag support for better categorization of messages. Maybe there is an extension... As soon as I finished installing it, I noticed an article on Slashdot about calendaring in Thunderbird. If you use Google Calendar and Thunderbird, I highly recommend you check it out!
• I am getting really excited about KDE 4. Following the easy directions, I managed to build it. Although I have yet to run a nested or solitary session, I can barely contain my excitement. The UI looks much more polished and, as always, you get the awesome assortment of KDE applications. I can't wait to switch over as soon as the first beta is released.
• I came to the depressing realization how slow my PC is. On one hand, I am surprised it still runs applications well considering it was assembled in the summer of 2002, right before I started college. The only upgrades have been memory (now 1G compared to 512) and many more hard drives (originally 2x80 and I've added a 250, 120, and 80GB (yes, I have 5 disk drives in the machine)). I finally realized it was slow when I was benchmarking some scripts I was writing for work and realized my laptop was handling about 8x more requests per second. Bottom line, I'll definitely be in the market for a new desktop by the end of the year. I think I'll wait for the quad core chips to come down in price...
• I am still trying to find a suitable replacement for Great Lakes Brewery. When I'm in Cleveland in May, I think I'll bring an extra suitcase to smuggle as much back with me as I can! In the meantime, the closest I've gotten to microbrewery bliss is Drake's. I've only had the IPA so far-- which is AMAZING-- but I'm hoping the quality rubs off on the others. The whole search process has been a challenging endeavor, but I'm up to the challenge. ;)

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Hey! I'm using Firefox V2 and it rocks. Only thing is a little weird is that some of the extensions don't play together well yet.

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