mia_mcdavid was out at the Renaissance Festival yesterday, but I skipped the event. I slept in for a bit, then drove out to Micro Center in the western suburbs. My Nokia 770 has been great, but I have been bumping up its limitations frequently in recent months. I had heard good things about the Asus Eee PC 900, but I really wanted to get my hands on the keyboard before buying one. This I was able to do, and I got a strong endorsement of the Eee PC from a stranger who was looking at other laptops there. So I bought one of them. I could have found a better price online, but there is something reassuring about buying from a store. If something goes wrong you can take it back and yell at someone face-to-face. Over the last day or so I have played with it it and it looks really good. Next step: Figure out how to ditch the basic interface and bring up the “advanced” (standard Linux PC) mode. I can get there: I know how to bring up a terminal windows, gain root access, and invoke vi. So all things are possible :-)>

Micro Center was a fun place to visit, compared to the usual mass market electronics shops. I passed on the Albert Einstein action figure, but did buy an “I void warranties” T-shirt, already thinking of my plans to hack the Eee PC.

In the afternoon I did some cleanup. I cleared my workbenches in the shop, and then went to the basement and cleaned off my drafting table and my desk. The latter is already somewhat recluttered with paperwork, manuals, and packaging from the Eee PC, but that will be filed, recycled, or tossed soon.

With choir having the week off, we took our son Tom to church on Sunday morning. He was very excited and noisy at first, but soon settled down. He was quite well behaved during the sermon, and evidently got something out of it: He said “Don’t worry” afterwards. Despite being almost completely nonverbal, something about church does get through to him, and he does pay some attention. If he were completely bored we would know it!

He took us to a nice lunch afterwards–He has a significant trust fund that can only be spent on non-essentials and entertainment. Again, without words, he knows how restaurants work and is quite comfortable with the concept of waiting for good food to be brought to him.

We took him home after lunch and then both of went down for naps, not getting up until after 3 PM. Mia did some weaving in the late afternoon and I ran a couple errands. After that we had a quiet evening at home.