Thursday night Alex Launi swung by to rescue me from being stuck without a car. We went out to Coyote Crossing in Conshohocken. It was a great dinner and we spent the evening talking about Ubuntu and how tough relationships are sometimes…

Friday evening at 5PM I received a call from the body shop informing me that R4’s repairs were complete and I could pick it up… before they closed at 5:30. I snagged Nita and she brought me down to the shop just in time to pick it up, good thing too since if I couldn’t get it that night I would have had to wait until Monday. The repairs look good, as usual Grand Sport Auto Body did a nice job. I expect the age (2003 vs 2006) and Make/Model (Toyota Rav4 vs Honda Civic) accounted for the difference in timing between getting the Civic back in a couple of days and the Rav taking over a week.

This weekend I was on call all weekend.

Monday evening was the PLUG West meeting, where John Kirk presented on the Perl Data Language. The Polyhedra 3D Graphics Application bit of the talk was interesting on an acedemic level, but I really enjoyed the later Document Scanning Application part of the talk - where he used perl to analyze coloration on a document to determine where specific horizontal and vertical lines were, then crop the image accordingly. Image manipulation with perl? Cool. After the meeting Paul, the organizer of the PLUG West meetings, JP Vossen, John Kirk, Karen, Kenny and I went to McKenzie Brewhouse for the usual after meeting discussion and beer. I wasn’t planning on having a beer, but it was St. Patrick’s Day AND McKenzie’s is one of the breweries from Lew Bryson’s PA Brewery book that I haven’t been to. I had their amber ale and lots of good discussion with my table mates. We didn’t end up leaving until around 11!

But a real highlight of the evening? Kenny gave me his old laptop! It’s a Compaq Armada E500 - 800mhz, 330M of RAM. It’s a fantastic replacement for my 500mhz, 128M Inspiron 7500 with the cracking screen. This Armada (I’m typing on it right now) is ligher than the Inspiron, has a nicer form factor (smaller) and the better specs are very nice - especially in terms of RAM. As soon as I got home I wiped the OpenBSD install (hehe) and installed Ubuntu Server + xfce4. It’s running like a champ, I’m so excited. And while we were chatting at the table that night I learned that JP also owns an old Inspiron 7500 but it’s got some bad parts - so I offered to give him my old one sans hard drive. Cool, my old laptop will have a new home too :) I’m so loving my new toy *hugs it* This also means I can put off buying a real new laptop for a while longer, which is good given my whole life situation right now.

Tuesday night I went out with John and Karen to Tamarindo’s on W Skippack Pike in Ambler. Wow, what a place! It’s a Mexican restaurant with a fantastic menu with a lot of seafood and steaks - not your typical taco joint. But their signature item is the free margarita with an entree. And not just any margarita - a bottomless one! They came around with pitchers to refill them! What torture, they were very smooth and had a generous portion of tequila, but I had to drive home so I only had half of one. Next time I’ll have to make sure I have someone else driving :)

Tonight I don’t have any out of the house plans, but there is an Ubuntu US-PA meeting where we’re tossing around some ideas for a Gutsy release party in April. We’re going for something more community-based rather than the Halloween party we had for Gutsy. Tomorrow I’m going out with Michael to have dinner and see Juno and discuss some things. We haven’t seen much of each other lately and have a lot to talk about. Friday I’m meeting up with a friend in New Jersey for some sushi (mmm) and warm sake (which I’ve never had). And the weekend? I keep forgetting it’s Easter weekend and that’s why I have no plans. Looks like it’s going to be a quiet weekend of reading and hacking.

Finally, I belong to the Phoenixville YMCA - which has a branch just 10 minutes from the house. Since moving I haven’t been (ack!) so I’m feeling a bit chubby and out of shape. Finally I decided to look up the other two clubs - and it turns out there is one 15 minutes from where I’m staying now! Excellent! Rush hour traffic in this area will make it a bit tricky to get there, but I might try to brave it once or twice a week, and will certainly start swinging by on the weekends for a bit.

Dinner now.