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Prepping the house to install a floor is oddly like trying to back up a computer to reformat it but not quite having enough spare hard drive space. Unfortunately, it’s not a problem that can be fixed with freeNAS; the solution was to make the kitchen impenetrably packed with furniture, and then throw out what didn’t fit. And convert those cheap bookshelves into a stand for the circular saw.

Anyway, floating floors are fairly simple, given that:

1. Even after getting a couple opinions on what the pictorial instructions could possibly mean, you’re happy to just go at it without really knowing.

2. You have enough patience to endure knee pain and put on band-aids so that you don’t bleed on the pretty new floor from the cuts it gave you.

3. Your respiratory system can successfully filter out the burning laminate dust the circular saw spews out.

And here are the pictures.

Scrabble this: the warehouse guy at the site rescued another Model M for me. I was in third grade when this was one was manufactured, and now I’m de-gunkifying it and preparing to see if I can put all the keys back on without looking at another keyboard.

Despite being a happy Ubuntu user, I installed Vista last week (for free, courtesy of the UA) on a spare hard drive. I have no desire whatsoever to use it, but it seemed that having a general awareness couldn’t hurt any more than using Lotus Notes on a daily basis does.

I still haven’t used it much, but I have to admit: Vista is pretty. It’s very pretty. And as I said to Cody when he asked for my initial impression, Vista may just out-pretty OS X, but it’s like getting smacked in the face by a really, really beautiful fish.

In fact, it’s so in-your-face pretty that it’s incredibly distracting and unnecessarily CPU/GPU-intensive. The flashy UI adornments don’t give you extra information to help you get your work done; they jump out at you like a 14-year-old attention-whore, screaming “Look at me! I’m so pretty!*”

I stick with my long-standing assertion that OS X tends to get out of your way and let you do what you need to do, where Windows trips you up and expects you to figure it out. And Linux – well, if you don’t like it, hack up obscure config files ’till you do.

Aero Glass/Cataracts interface

* Please enjoy the short version, too. I love these commercials, and they make about as much sense as some of Vista’s prettiness.

I’m typing this on a 13-year-old IBM Model M keyboard with real mechanical buckling springs: keys that clatter like a broken Ford and snap back up at you as if to say “Hey! I will smack you if you keep that up, mister.” Typing feels precise and deliberate again. They also have two features that increase home security:

1) With two going at once, the sound could be mistaken for an intense gattling gun battle.

2) The giant plastic-encased steel bases make them excellent tools for inflicting blunt force trauma.

Matt found these locally and on e-bay and cleaned them up. Please rescue any you come across if your everyday activities involve sifting through dumps. These things never die, but my mushy Apple keyboard might get killed soon. They’re glaring at each other.

At various times in my life I’ve thought that it would be nice to have one of those nifty headphone splitters so that when I fly somewhere with another person, we can both listen to the same device, or watch a movie on a laptop. I’ve owned at least three of them, but I have never successfully used one. Over the course of my lifetime I’ve spent, cumulatively, at least two hours trying to locate headphone splitters. Like any geek, I have numerous drawers full of nameless technological devices, not one of which has ever gone missing, except for the elusive headphone splitter.

I’m quite certain that next time I move, I will find a secret cache of indescribable pieces of hardware – widgets, dongles, adapters – each of which plugs into nothing I still own or can even remember owning. But I’ll keep them. I have to. They may come in handy one day, when for some reason a friend has a dire need for a 2-inch USB extender or a Centronics SCSI terminator (I don’t think I have any friends who would get themselves into such a pickle, but one never knows), both of which I can locate in a heartbeat. Most likely, the heaps of essentially useless items are obscuring the view of my headphone splitter, which is up to something entirely mischievous at the bottom of the drawer (though clearly, it is not procreating, because unlike other adapters, headphone splitters vanish instead of multiplying).

My predicament brought to mind a great article declaring war on dongly things that Douglas Adams wrote almost ten years ago, and which still holds true.

The laptop is free. It’s better described in pictures than in words.

Though sawing through a laptop lock is not hard per se (though it is fun), it’s not exactly the kind of thing someone could do while you nip off to the bathroom for a minute. But, I still don’t think the manufacturer should send step-by-step instructions without more significant coaxing.

Unfortunately, we’ll have to discover a new target for Trapped in the Closet jokes now.