Ubuntu Dapper Drake is scheduled for official release on June 1st. I generally wait a few weeks after a release to upgrade so that most of the bugs can be worked out or someone has posted about a particular problem already when I run into it. Not exactly the most community supportive thing to do when it comes to bugs and things, but I really don’t have the time to mess with things when they break. But this time I thought I’d try something different, I decided to upgrade to Dapper on Thursday afternoon. People assured me that Dapper was “solid” and I shouldn’t have any problems with the upgrade, but I wasn’t terribly optimistic this is an old laptop and things are bound to go wrong.

So I did the upgrade. At first I thought X was broken, but that was a mistake of my own. All my xfce4 settings were wiped out, which was slightly annoying but not a fatal flaw. There was, however, a fatal flaw – wireless. I did the upgrade using my wired card since it’s faster, and when I plugged in the wireless it wasn’t working. Same problem I had with Debian – it sees the card, it knows that it’s a wireless card, but won’t connect to the network. Bleh. That really is the trouble with the firmware on this card, I don’t exactly understand how it plays with the kernel to debug, so when it works I am happy and when it doesn’t I spend hours toiling with it until I give up. I am now wondering if I had done the upgrade with the wireless card how it would have behaved, and wondering if it’s not a problem with how the kernel was compiled, but the kernel version that’s the problem.

Whatever the problem, I really didn’t want to spend more time on it. Trying to downgrade back to Breezy would be more trouble than it’s worth since I didn’t have much on the laptop that I needed to back up, so I grabbed my Breezy disk and did a complete reinstall. Ubuntu supports releases for at least 18 months, so I can keep this laptop with Breezy for another year or so, in that time I might find a solution to this wireless thing. I don’t mind sticking with the software versions I have on here, the newer ones would probably slow down this old thing too much to be worth the additional bells and whistles anyway.

The other night I had a dream that we had a microwave. Michael and I have been living together almost 5 years and we’ve never owned a microwave. I haven’t wanted one, we don’t eat the kind of food that was designed to be cooked in a microwave oven and we prefer to heat up leftovers in the toaster oven. The rare times when I could use one for something like heating up refried beans I find ways around the need for a microwave, and it’s certainly not worth taking up a bunch of space on my counter for those rare occasions. But not owning a microwave is a strange thing for an American. When we were in West Virginia visiting the National Radio Astronomy Observatory we went on a tour where they explained the National Radio Quiet Zone and how anyone living within a few miles of the observatory wasn’t allowed to own microwaves, the presenter then asked if anyone in the room didn’t own a microwave and I was the only one who raised my hand. Later in the tour a woman with her young child came up to me to express her shock that we didn’t own one.

Another thing that’s unusual not to have here is cable television. When I tell people I don’t have cable it’s almost always automatically assumed it’s because I can’t afford it, indeed, most of the other people I know without cable have financial constraints that prevent them from having it. When I try to explain to most people that it’s because I don’t watch a lot of TV they either think I’m weird, or try to justify their tv watching and/or explain that they hardly ever watch it either but they’d really miss $show and $channel if they didn’t have cable. I really have never been much of a television or a movie person, I am pretty picky when it comes to what I watch.

I am watching a couple shows lately. I get the latest Doctor Who episodes each week from a friend in Europe. The new episodes lack some of the campiness of the old ones, seeing as they actually gave the show a reasonable budget this time. I’ve also been watching The Sopranos, picking up the DVDs at the library in Lansdale. It’s a good show, I’m really enjoying it, HBO does a great job with their programming. Finally, we just recently aquired the whole first season and most of the second season of Lost. I know a lot of people who really enjoy it, but I’m having trouble getting into it. The friend who sent it to us said that the first bit sucks (it really does) and that it gets better, but I’m not sure if I’m too jaded by the beginning to see that it’s improving or if 15 episodes in still counts as part of the first bit.

And finally, I’m feeling better than I was on Thursday. The saddle soreness has calmed down considerably, I hardly notice the pain anymore. My legs feel better, I wasn’t bothered to walk around yesterday in Rehoboth. Unfortunately my right knee has been bothering me since before we took the bike ride, it is the same knee pain Michael had a few weeks back (when he was in a similar stage of gym working-out-ness). I think I just pulled something in it and am taking it easy, I didn’t join Michael at the gym today. The weather could certainly be better, it’s creeping up to the 80s today (and tomorrow, and the next day – close to 90 they say!) with pretty significant humidity. Yuck. It might be time to put those window unit air conditioners in.

No plans for Memorial Day yet. The only plans we really do have this weekend are to go to the new moon sweat lodge tonight. Hm, I should probably do some cleaning of the house today.