Tonight we finally got our landscaping in! Nine new plants take the place of our four bushes, soon they will be joined with a handful of hostas courtesy of . Mulch will be added soon, and that job will be done!

I’m tired, so I’m going to while away the rest of the evening playing with my Eee PC!

Tonight Tasha and I decided to purchase a paper shredder so we can eliminate the giant piles of old mail that have accumulated in boxes, corners, and other locations inside our house. We go to Wal-Mart, pick out our oh-so-elegant cross cut paper shredder for the astonishing sum of $20 and check out.

The thing was a little bulky, so Tasha was holding it while I rearranged my change in my wallet. I take the receipt, fold it in half, and slide it inside the box so I didn’t have to juggle one more scrap of paper in this wonderful balancing act that is capitalism.

I take the shredder from Tasha, and we head for the door. The little grey haired old lady by the door says that she thought she saw me slide my receipt into the box, and she has to check if she sees anyone concealing their receipt. I told her that I might be mistaken, but I was pretty certain that I paid my money and now own this item. She told me that it wasn’t until I left the door of the store. I am pretty sure this is complete and utter bullshit, but not wanting to make a scene (more due to the fact that I was in a hurry) I opened the box, grabbed the receipt and let the lady mark it with a highlighter.

This type of thing really pisses me off for several reasons. 1.) I paid for the item, it was mine at that point. 2.) If she saw me putting the receipt in the box she also saw me folding my money and putting it in my wallet at almost the same time. 3.) If I was going to steal a paper shredder and walk bald-faced out of the store through the security scanner, wouldn’t it make more sense for me to steal one of the $150 shredders they had? Or at least a 10-page shredder that does CDs?

Now, I didn’t make a scene. This old retiree was clearly just doing what she was told to do to collect the minimum wage that Wal-Mart pays these people. It’s really not her fault. The whole process still irks me though, despite the fact that the only person to complain to would be more faceless drones of Wal-Mart that wouldn’t give a damn either.

Oh well. I got my paper shredder and a good blog topic, so I suppose I can be happy at that. (For the record, this whole topic makes me HOT, as in angry, so I am complying with this months NaBloPoMo topic. woot for me.)

Today I launched myself back into home repairs and yardwork, digging out the bed in front of my house that used to be home to our bushes. I dug out the area right next to our sidewalk with a quarter circle to meet the previously dug out area, and on the other end I made a half circle so we’ll have an interesting nearly kidney shaped area in which to landscape. The guy at Old Heritage that helped us with our planting before was on vacation so we didn’t actually purchase plants today, but we did make a trip out there and I plan to go and get my plants Monday night after work.

Right under our front window we have a flat area with some trim that was sorely in need of a fresh coat of paint, so I did that today as well. I had plenty of white paint left over, so I went around the trim near our front door and that freshened things up significantly.

My brother-in-law came over today and was regaling me with tales of a small desktop hovercraft that he built out of some airplane motors and a plastic bag, so when I dropped him back off at his house I went to see. It was pretty impressive! He gave me a few Robot magazines to read after pointing out some of the interesting kits, this was the type of computer programming I always wanted to do when I was little so it was pretty exciting stuff.

Tomorrow I plan to finish painting the deck. Hopefully it won’t be too miserable, but I’m almost certain that it will be. Ah well, these chores have to get done sometime!

I have to say, once you figure out how to do things in Xandros living with the Eee PC is fantastically easy. I have installed the newest version of my Pidgin chat software, Firefox 3 optimized for the Eee, and the compiz fusion 3D desktop.

Compiz is highly thought of in newer linux distributions because it has some extremely neat visual effects, much like OS X. Window animations, transparency, and virtual desktops are now all at my fingertips, and the Eee PC handles them all beautifully.

One of the features that I really like is what they call “wobbly windows” which changes the visual dynamic of the windows as you resize and move them around, having the borders deform around your cursor as if they are made of jello until they unsnap from the edges of the screen. Then, as the window follows your cursor around, it flops around like a gelatenous cube. Its purely a cool visual and nothing more, but the its the small finishing pieces that make this window manager excellent.

I’m getting fairly close to a customized environment that I am happy with. I want to configure my email and get The Gimp installed but I should be about done after that!

Tonight was an interesting exercise of the Eee PC’s abilities. For reasons unknown (I suspect some bum packages I installed while trying to get some cool effect working), my StarOffice (think Microsoft Office) was crashing intermittently. Instead of just leaving it alone, I had to try to fix it and in the process I totally screwed up the window manager on my Eee.

It always annoys me when things like this happen, however there is a certain confidence that comes with breaking your toy for the first time and having to put it back together.

So I launched into “figure out how to recover the Eee PC” mode. Interestingly, it only took me around 10 minutes. It seems that all Eee PCs come equipped with a restore partition that is accessible by pressing the F9 key during startup. This option lets you either restore the OS (which didn’t work so well for me) or do a full factory reset of the system. The latter took around 8 minutes to format the partitions, reinflate the image, and reboot.

My Eee PC was restored to its pristine, factory glory! Impressed doesn’t even begin to describe it! Score one for reading the manual!

I’ve got about three big projects left to do outside, and two of them I can’t do if its rained recently. I’d love to have a few days with enough sun that I can get my yard landscaped and my deck painted, but until that happens these tasks must remain undone.

Things are finally starting to look up at the office. We’re finally making some headway on our projects, and the end is in sight. Another day or two of the same progress as we made today and things will be essentially done!

Not much else to report for now! I think I’m going to sit down tonight and brainstorm a few topics for blogging since its been a lot about my boring workload and my boring house repairs. Surely I have to be more interesting than that!!

Just finished the Eee PC Battery Test. I charged the battery until the OS reported it as “Battery Full” and ran it off the battery while doing my normal tasks with full screen brightness. Blogging, chatting, and I installed a few packages that I didn’t have already.

The thing got a whopping 5 hours, 10 minutes of battery life.

My next test will be exactly the same thing with 50% screen brightness. I must say I’m exceedingly impressed with these results so far.

Today was an exceedingly long day at the office. Despite having practically no down time, I was quite productive for most of the day and actually got the rare opportunity to program for awhile. In fact, in order to meet a deadline I’m about ready to jump back on and get some more work done tonight. No rest for the weary!

Since its a rainy day, there’s not much to report on the home repairs front. We have systematically replaced nearly every light fixture in the house, including the exterior fixtures. We have removed, repainted, and rehung the shutters. I edged my lawn yesterday, thanks to my supervisor loaning me his Black and Decker edger. I have several big tasks remaining (painting the basement ceiling, landscaping, carpeting, linoleum) left to do on my list, and I’ve lost some of my momentum to finish them. Hopefully I can knuckle under and get those larger purchases made as to kick me into high gear and finish the ol’ To Do list.

Life with the Eee PC remains very good. I did some additional configuration and I am running a battery test in performance mode. I will post the results tomorrow! That’s it for now!

I am writing this post from my brand spankin’ new Eee PC! I have to say, the hype is totally justified.  The screen is perfect for web viewing, the keyboard is just right for touch typing, and the thing is DEAD silent!

I haven’t figured out how to kick the thing over into standard desktop mode, but the Easy Mode is… well… easy. I’m going to spend the rest of the evening getting acquainted before taking this thing in to work in the morning! I suspect this is going to begin a small counter-revolutino against our giant company provided Dell laptops. If they would let me, I would carry this thing with me as my primary machine.

That’s all for now!!

Unfortunately, my Eee PC is not in my hands yet. It seems that UPS doesn’t deliver on Saturdays, so my machine is sitting in the customer center in East Peoria and should be on my porch when I get home tomorrow.

Soon it will be mine… and just in time for GenCon!! I’ll post pictures when it arrives!