• The first fine Saturday that's coincided with a green bin collection week so I got out into the garden this morning to give the lawn its first mow of the Spring.
• Inspired by that and the [relatively] recent upgrade of swamprat to openSUSE 10.2, I imported by giblib and camE into the Build Service (home repo).
• Resurrected the webcam, pointing at the newly mown garden.
• New season of Doctor Who started this evening. The new companion, Martha Jones, was fantastic and I think she'll work out great. There was a good pace to the episode with everything happening at a nice high tempo until the last few minutes. If you missed it tonight, catch tomorrow's repeat on BBC Three.

Well, laptop is back and repaired, I've done online updates on both Linux and t'other OS and now I'm ready to get back to normality.

Having it back has also meant I've finally been able to upload some more photos of Callum.

Easter vacation to do list (unordered):

• Dig into Gimmie packages for 10.3
• Finish Hebrew text study
• Placement report
• Chaplaincy essay

Well, it's now the first week of the vacation. The repair on my laptop was completed but it then failed its QA test and so went back to the engineer yesterday - news today I hope.

Hebrew proposal was accepted and, to that end, spent yesterday and Monday translating Psalm 139: 17-22 ready to do a text study on it.

All vestments have now been delivered apart from my stoles which are a different matter as they have to be custom designed, painted, embroidered etc. So, I now have a couple of clerical shirts (just nasty poly-cotton ones that were part of a package - going to get some nicer cotton ones for if I were ever to wear one), cassock, surplice, cassock alb and a black preaching scarf. I also have a handy 'slot-in' clerical collar insert for normal-collared shirts. It's made of fabric rather than plastic so it's washable, flexible and looks more at home in a shirt collar. I'll probably keep that in the glove box of the car in case I need it. Might possibly get a second one to keep in my laptop bag for when I'm out and about on foot.

The number of openSUSE-related mails that are stacking up in the absence of my laptop is growing, hope I have it back soon.

• Added Boyd to Planet SUSE.
• Boyd updated Tomboy in GNOME:Community to 0.6.1 because of my current lack of laptop.
• Thank you Boyd.

Shouldn't be too much longer without my laptop. Spoke to Asus's repair partner company this morning and they're just waiting on a new keyboard from Asus. Other than the keyboard it was the mainboard and CPU that need replacing. Hopefully, they'll put a Core Duo in instead of the Core Solo it had before by mistake

Submitted my first draft of MM364 late yesterday afternoon. I'm pretty sure it's utter pants but at least I can get some feedback on it. Submitted my proposal for my Hebrew assignment this morning.

Still haven't tried on the clerical shirts that were delivered. That said, since I don't have a curacy to go to yet, it's hardly urgent...

• Bit of a rough weekend - we've all had a cold which, for Callum especially - being his first one - has been annoying. I had to pull out of an Alpha away-day I was supposed to be helping with as a result.
• Should be able to get the status of my laptop by the end of the week, hoping for positive news - apart from anything else, using the Less Free OS at college is driving me nuts, even with portable version of Firefox, Gaim, PuTTY and AbiWord.
• On that note, MM364 is just about at 1000 words.

Laptop was collected yesterday, hoping that it can repaired without losing any data - will be really miffed if I lose anything.

Clerical shirts from Hayes & Finch were delivered yesterday - how scary is that? I haven't even dared take them out of their packaging to try them on - that would make the whole malarky far too real.

...not even for a dead laptop.

Two things that match that description so far today:

• Work of the college variety. Started my MM364 (Developing Preaching) assignment this morning. Slow start but then, I always start slow.
• Work of the openSUSE variety. Seems JP's message had some effect - double figures of people in the channel this morning. Added JP to list of ops since, especially with the lappie issue, I'm not on the channel 24/7.

Phoned Asus yesterday and the laptop is now registered with them as needing repair and it's packaged up (in the original packaging - not like me to have kept it) ready to go back. Have to phone today to arrange a collection time. Pick-up and return warranties are good.

In the meantime, thanks to Portable Apps, I have Firefox, PuTTY, Gaim and AbiWord on my key drive so using the Windoze machines in the college library to work will be slightly less unbearable.

Another laptop that is!

Yes, that's right, my Asus laptop appears to have died on me. I was on my way to bed last night, stopped in the study to check my email before hitting the hay and it had locked up hard. I checked the hard drive wasn't being accessed and held the power button to power it off.

Now it won't power back on properly. I press the power button and it powers up but the hard drive access light goes on solid and the fan seems to go to full speed. It doesn't even seem to complete the POST. The really annoying (and embarrassing) tihng is that I didn't have a backup of $HOME so I've potentially lost all my documents, emails etc from, well, ever.

Thankfully, unlike when the last laptop (the infamous "Beast") died on me, this one is still under warranty so tomorrow afternoon - when I get back from the college quiet day - I'll be on the blower to Asus support. It's covered by a pick-up and return warranty in the event of it having to go back in. I'm hoping that the fact that it doesn't even complete the POST (not even displaying anything on screen) means it's not the drive itself but maybe the IDE controller that's at fault.

Gimmie 0.2.4 is out and my patch to support openSUSE has been merged in - thanks Alex. It's going to be moved to GNOME:Community real soon and hopefully we'll get it into Factory in time to be shipped in [at least the FTP tree of] 10.3, with an XSession that will allow people to use GNOME with Gimmie instead of the traditional panel.

New people on Planet SUSE:

• Henne
• Hub
• James