Arrival and temperamental routers

Against the considerable might of Alison's worst fears, we've somehow managed to survive yet another white knuckle flight from Brisbane to KL. My DS and the new Advanced Wars proved to be a welcome distraction from the tedium of travel and screaming children. Unfortunately the addictive nature of the game coupled with the rare treat of arriving ahead of schedule meant that I didn't get quite as many winks as I'd hoped on the plane, never a good thing on a midnight flight.



Thankfully the stop over at Changi Airport proved to be more relaxing than I'd originally expected.

Struggling against a wave of narcolepsy, I've tried to keep myself busy by 'fixing' mum's wireless connection here in Kajang. Still not entirely sure how I got it to work but somehow my frantic tinkering of the WEP settings seems to have done the trick. Sad to say my triumph is somewhat soured by the infuriating tendency of this router to reset itself for no good reason. From what I can tell it seems to be caused by too much network traffic so I don't have high hopes for setting up video chat for Skype here.

We've already been treated to the first of many greasy breakfasts and I must say it's nice to have real asian food again.

On a sad note, we've had yet another aquatic death. While popping in the two week feeder on the way out I had trouble spotting Connie in the tank. After rummaging among the rocks we soon found what had become of her. The taxi was on the way so we had to forgo the twenty-one gun salute and dug a shallow grave for the poor lass next to her brother. Another goldfish (Gustav) had actually joined the family a couple of weeks ago so we suspect foul play. Hopefully the others will survive till we return to conduct a full investigation.

Not going to let that case a downer on our vacation though. Super excited about the next two and a half weeks with Chinese New Year, weddings and heaps to look forward to.

She's back

Life is good again. I have Gemini back safe and sound. Edna is a good little companion but nothing beats a full sized laptop for use.

I've also been getting a little annoyed with the linux distribution that comes with th eee PC (Xandros) so I might have to install Ubuntu on it soon. Maybe when we get back from Malaysia. Speaking of which, I can't believe we're going to be flying off in less than a week. Hooray for holidays!

A new member to the family

To the household computer family that is. I've been reading about the Asus Eee PC and decided to pick one up on Friday to play around with it. It's marketed as a simple laptop for students and first time PC users but I think it's really pretty neat. My original intention was to get a new laptop so that Gemini could retire to Tivo duty but I guess that'll just have to wait a while longer.



As you can see it's remarkably tiny (either that or I have bigger hands than I'd like to think). Typing on the darn thing was a little challenging at first but after practice I've gotten used to it. Not surprisingly I'm typing this blog entry on the lil gal (who we've christened Edna after Edna Mode, as she's small and all dressed in black) and I'm not having any issues.

So far I've installed a few applications on it and customised it a little but the machine comes with pretty much everything you'd need on it out of the box. Asus have a special version of Xandros Linux installed on it which certainly does the job. I can do pretty much 90% of the things I'd use a PC for on it with limitations coming from the lowish spec and small screen. Reasonable compromises given it's price (retails in Australia for $500) and superb portability (weighs less than a kilogram).

This'll certainly be a lot easier to take on the plane to Malaysia that's for sure :P