Moving sucks!

I’m really looking forward to the new apartment. There’s a lot to look forward to about it.

The problem is, I haven’t done much shooting in weeks because of all the moving stuff. And I’m having problems with getting a DSL connection, so I haven’t bothered to get my computers all set up until they’ve got something to connect to, so I haven’t been posting because my only internet-connected device that’s MINE is my cellphone. And it’s got a keyboard and upwards of 900kb/s of bandwidth… but it tends to run out of CPU power for more detailed tasks.

The new place is going to be great for studio shooting because the space that I can clear up by just moving a few pieces of furniture is going to be both wider and longer than the old place. The only real problem is that I need to get a proper backdrop stand first because the shooting space is right up against the back door and that’s just not a photogenic background. I’ve already got some white-faced hardboard to cover up the carpet so that I can use seamless paper without it getting all crumply instantly.

It’s also a two-level apartment, which means that shooting should interrupt my wife far less. And it has good karma in other ways too.

Oh, but the new geekroom! It’s got more square feet, so I can fit all of the bookshelves up there and still have more room to work with. And, coupled with the patio, it should help me indulge my various desires to build physical pieces of art instead of just photography. So I’m going to get a bunch of stuff that was out in the storage locker and bring it back so I can make use of it in the new place.

So the place, right now, is filled with boxes and I finally got DSL working. Apparently AT&T doesn’t actually verify that the phone number is anywhere near the service address when they drop a line… so somehow they either gave my wife the wrong number the first time or I typoed, but we were trying to debug a DSL connection that was going to the wrong address.

It also looks like one of my hard drives didn’t make it through the move. A very OLD drive well out of warranty and it was already in the “warning” zone on SMART, so I had it backed up.

Anyway, I went to wine country for a day-trip and took some pictures and had some fun and now I should be able to post more often…

I keep thinking that what I really want is one of those cute and sexy "NetBook" laptops. See, right now, I get a 15" MacBook Pro from work. But I don't like doing fun stuff with my work laptop any more than I like when my home computer was more powerful than my work computer. And I've got a very fast desktop with a huge case that has tons of room for drives and stuff, so I don't need or really want a fancy laptop for home.

The problem is, when I tried the early Asus EEE laptops, I discovered that the keyboard was about an inch too small, so it kinda gets squeezed out -- my phone already is a two-finger typing device, so adding a second device that's not fast enough to type with doesn't help that much. The more recent NetBook designs from various folks seem to have this fixed. And the cost for one that's running Linux (I've got one Windows box and I'll keep it that way -- running XP, not Vista) that has a slightly bigger keyboard is not actually that bad.

I had to decide if I hated the phone company (Pac Bell, who got picked up by SBC, who became AT&T) or the cable company (Comcast, better known as Comcrap) more and decided to go through a reseller of AT&T's DSL connection -- sonic.net. The nice part is that they just have a bunch of smart people on the help line who can debug and fix your problems for you, as opposed to AT&T which has the front-line support wearing drool-proof headsets and three layers before you get to somebody who's paid to have a brain.