ConDuit Tomorrow; The Joy of Eee!

So, I'm off to the ConDuit Sci-Fi convention tomorrow. It's just down the street from my house, and the rates for the con aren't that bad, either. Lucky me. It's actually on the route that I take to work every day. No getting lost for me.

ConDuit is a fun little con, one that's on my "must" list, due to the closeness issue mentioned above. Also, it's great to get together with all the local talent and geek the heck out. My friend Paul Genesse is having a book launch party there tomorrow (today, in point of fact)...okay, it's frickin' Friday, all right, from 3:00 to 6:00 at the con hotel (Radisson). He's just come out with a book that's near and dear to my heart, The Dragon Hunters. I've seen this story in its various incarnations over the years, and Paul's done a great job with it. I may have given him a few pointers here and there, not to boast. If you're around, please come and meet him. He'd love to see all the fans and potential fans at his party.

I'll probably hanging about in various places, doing the nefarious things that shady writer types are known to do. (Like slowly consuming all the oxygen in the room for our meaningless biotic activities). Remember, getting into the Dealer's Room and the Art Show are both on the free list, so dropping by will not necessarily cost you any dough.

Now, then. I never did understand that, really. Is it now, or then? It can't be both, can it? That would be some sort of rift in the space/time continuum, right? I mean, I'm more of a Fantasy/Horror geek, but it sounds like an issue. Anyhooo...I was bellyaching last post about my Dell Mini 10 and the things that were wrong with it. Yep, a few more issues came to light, and that was, as they say, "it" for my patience. I took the sucker back. Big time. Happily, the big box store where I'd picked it up was okay with my esoteric explanation of why I was double plus unhappy with the whole affair. Money in hand, I took the trip to the mighty newegg.com and ordered what I SHOULD have ordered in the first place.

Yep, I'm typing this post on my new Asus EeePC 1000HE (blue) with 2 gig memory stick installed, and running Ubuntu 9.04 UNR Linux. Man, what a difference. I'll go over all my thovghts about the netbook in a later post, perhaps, but let it be known that the Asus has it ALL OVER the Dell in terms of solidity, responsiveness, and general sweetness. I'm not certain that the Asus keyboard is any better than the Dell, but that's about the only point in question. In general, I just have to be very accurate with my typing to avoid spurious button combos. As my boss calls them "fat fingers". Which is so very apt for me. For instance, I just about deleted all of my progress with some strange combo I just pressed, and only saved it with some wild act of computer heroism that I can't adequately describe to the readership here, because it might endanger agents in the field.

I'm sure that I'll get better at typing without blundering into the wrong buttons over the course of the next few days, but for now, I just have to be careful. Just know that I'm a happy dude, busy linux-cising with my wee laptop.

I'll check in after ConDuit to give you the skinny, and may well have a new Magnatune suggestion for you by then. Until then, farewell, and keep safe the holy blogsphere...