• small size (my Optio W30 is good, a bit larger would be OK)
• fast shutter response (the W30 is unacceptably slow)
• good low-light performance (the W30 is *terrible*)
• SD/MMC media
• good manual controls, ideally with a manual focus ring or knob (the W30's onscreen focus UI is unusable.)

• SSL-MD5 talk
• hackerspaces.org organizational stuff (conference call, blog, meeting people, book, hanging out at C-Base)
• feeling like I was really participating in the conference (due to Noisebridge)
• helping ariyanakylstram put together a Robot Girl burlesque costume in 24 hours flat (thanks Jimmie for the perfect heart)
• buying a car
• staying at the Park Inn for convenience's sake
• getting upgraded to BA business class for the LHR-SFO flight (I'm ruined, I'm never going to be able to fly international coach again...)

Room 907
Park Inn
Alexanderplatz 7
10178 Berlin, Germany

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• After perhaps 6 hours of use, I'm touchtyping with an almost acceptable error rate. The keyboard feel is completely acceptable, it's just the tiny pitch and a few odd key placements that are giving me problems. (According to my measurements, the Eee keys are 15.8 mm apart, while the Thinkpad keys are 18.2 mm and a desktop keyboard is 19mm.)
• the Eee sleeps very well, going to sleep on lid close or after a little while idle, or after clicking an icon. In sleep mode, 9 hours took it down to about 30% battery. It wakes up in about 10 seconds (though I noticed that a big chunk of this is the X server; game audio comes back after about 5 seconds), which is a little too long to be comfortable. It doesn't seem to have a hibernate-to-"disk" mode yet.
• It lasts a few hours of actual use, I haven't had a battery-only usage session yet.
• It's running an Asus-customized version of Xandros, a Debian derivative. It warms the cockles of my cold, black heart to see update.eeepc.asus.com in /etc/apt/sources.list. And, my first sudo apt-get update; sudo apt-get dist-upgrade upgraded me from openssl 0.9.8c-4 to 0.9.8c-4etch3, so somebody's not completely asleep on the job. (Alas it didn't install a blacklisting ssh client, so no automagic fixing of bad keys if generated prior to upgrade.)
• the default software install is reasonable for their designated market, including Firefox 2.0.0.11 (with the non-free Flash plugin, sigh), several games, OpenOffice 2.0, Skype, and a bunch of reasonably-integrated KDE and Gnome programs (kworldclock gets its own icon), Adobe Acrobat Reader, ucview, etc. The icewm default works OK. The launcher (AsusLauncher) is a little wierd in that it takes over the root window, so it's always lurking behind your apps and there's no way to Alt-Tab it to the front.
• (Most important tip: Ctrl-Alt-T gets you an xterm.)
• The available package list via apt-get is a bit too limited; there's no openssh-server or gcc or even ntpdate (it doesn't do network time sync at all as far as I can tell). netcat is part of the default install though. :)
• the disk situation is a little odd:

  [  236.560000] SCSI device sda: 7880544 512-byte hdwr sectors (4035 MB)
  [  236.560000] SCSI device sdb: 31522176 512-byte hdwr sectors (16139 MB)
  Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
  /dev/sda1             1.5G  168M  1.2G  13% /
  /dev/sdb1              15G  207M   14G   2% /home
  

  The "20GB" is provided as a 4GB (apparently on-board) SSD plus a 16GB daughtercard under the memory-bay door, both attached via SATA ports on the ICH6. The 4GB sda is partitioned into 2.3 GB, 1.5 GB, 8 MB FAT32, and 8 MB EFI, with some kind of aufs setup across the first two partitions; from /boot/initramfs-eeepc.img:/init:

  mount -t ext2 -o ro $ROOT /mnt-system
  if ! mount -t ext3 -o rw,noatime /dev/sda2 /mnt-user; then
  ...
  mount -t aufs -o br:/mnt-user:/mnt-system none /mnt
  

  I haven't figured out what they're doing here, nor why exactly.
• The multi-touch touchpad works as advertised (in xterm even). They do have System Integrator Disease; from /usr/share/doc/powermonitor/README:

  Notes on ASUS BIOS ACPI implementation:
  * the battery level is reported in % rather than mAh.
  * it moves in discrete steps: 100% / 75% / 50% / 25% / 10% / 7% / 1% / 0%
  * the code is written for this behaviour, and will not work on other ACPI implementations

  Sigh.

wealhtheow

It is one of only three known instances in which the FBI has backed off from such a data demand, known as a "national security letter," or NSL, which is not subject to judicial approval and whose recipient is barred from disclosing the order's existence.
NSLs are served on phone companies, Internet service providers and other electronic communications service providers, but because of the gag order provision, the public has little way to know about them. Their use soared after the September 2001 terrorist attacks, when Congress relaxed the standard for their issuance. FBI officials now issue about 50,000 such orders a year.

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

2008-05-05

No warrants have ever been served to rsync.net, or rsync.net principals or employees.

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

May 8, 2008

No warrants have ever been served to hexapodia.org or hexapodia.org
principals, and no search or seizure has ever been performed on
hexapodia.org.
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bohemianrapsody

The lead singer of a neovaudevillian performance troupe called the James Gang, Mr. James has assembled his universe from oddly assorted props and castoffs: a gramophone with a crank and velvet turntable, an old wooden icebox and a wardrobe rack made from brass pipes that were ballet bars in a previous incarnation.

"If you go to Google Trends and track the number of times it is mentioned, the curve is almost algorithmic from a year and a half ago."

• I walked on a glacier.
• my hostel had 4 SFBAers out of a population of maybe 30.
• kittens are adorable.