Thanks to Pascal Terjan for pointing out the solution to my Evo problem - change the delivery method on those accounts to None. I'm still angry, though. Just because I CAN be angry. :)

Just who had the incredibly stupid idea to stop you sending email from disabled accounts in Evolution? I only want to RECEIVE mail from one account, my IMAP server, which aggregates the mail from my many providers. I want to SEND it from many accounts, though - sometimes I need the mail to come from one address, sometimes from another. Previously I could simply define all the accounts, only enable the IMAP one, and still send from the others. Now I have to temporarily enable another account any time I want to send email from that address, then disable it again so Evolution doesn't check the email from it if I click the "check mail" button and screw up my IMAP system. Grr. Grr. Grr. Stupid bloody idea.

So after ESR turned out to be a moron, now it seems Linus is a troll. Life's full of revelations!

What bothers me most about the infamous post is not that it's wrong, although it is, but that it's a horrible troll. Till posted a perfectly normal, productive, low-key request for discussion on how to implement something that was missing, and Linus decided to turn it into an internet-wide flame war. I just can't get my head around how someone who's been around as long as Linus has could possibly think that would be a good idea. Why not at least get some evidence together, write a far more calm post, and post it as a separate thread? I just don't get it. I mailed him and tried to make that point, but he just wrote back and defended his point some more. I'm not arguing the point, but the complete lack of politeness and netiquette in the way it was made. Ah, well.

Spent the last couple of days fighting an annoying graphics bug on my HTPC. After umpteen attempts to roll back various system components and one brand new graphics card it turns out to be xorg-x11-server at fault, though the symptoms really wouldn't make you think so. Sigh. Rolled it back to the 1204 snapshot (thanks, Hawkwind), and all is now well again. And now I have one graphics card too many. Anyone want a year old, hideously dust-encrusted, MSI Geforce MX440 for shipping costs? Form an orderly queue...

f-spot 0.15 finally supports exporting images to gallery2, so the gallery is now running gallery2 instead of gallery1 and looks much prettier. Yay. That's new hotness #1.

New hotness #2 is the new version of deskbar-applet, with live Beagle queries. This is so insanely cool it's hard to describe, but everyone should have one.

Had a terribly bourgeois day on Friday - we went to the market on Granville Island (which isn't really an island...) and bought some excitingly expensive pasta, meat, fruit, vegetables, cheese, coffee and so forth. A nice change from Safeway and the Chinese supermarkets on Kingsway, and the stuff is pretty nice. Especially the pasta.

Realised I haven't mentioned much about work lately. I am a bit disappointed by the Club Christmas release, which will have some nice things - all the updates released since 2006.0, GNOME 2.12 and OO.o 2.0 (though they're already available separately), and some graphical goodies - but it won't have KDE 3.5 or an updated version of X.org, which is something of a missed opportunity. Ah, well. I expect they'll make it into the next Club release. It will also be i586 only, which is a shame, as we really need to treating x86-64 as being as important as i586 by now.

On the other hand, it seems like Arkub has more time to work on Club stuff again lately, which is always great - had a request from a Club member to provide the manuals for 2006.0 and we had them up within two days, which is really nice. And some members have been coming up with some excellent suggestions lately which I've been passing on and trying to get posted in Bugzilla; I just hope at least some of them get acted upon in the near future.

Bit of a round up after yesterday's bitch post! What I omitted to mention yesterday was my Great Entertainment Rearrangement Project. I got paid unexpectedly early, so on Sunday I bought a new receiver, a Pioneer 815S. (Of course, immediately upon getting everything hooked up I discovered ten reasons I should have bought the higher end 1015S, but never mind). This allowed me to dump the horrible Logitech Z5300 speakers, use my lovely new Mini Monitors (see two posts ago) instead, and use shiny digital audio connections everywhere, which cut down wonderfully on the cables. I also moved the TV out of the corner and into the middle of the room so the speakers wouldn't have to be so awkwardly positioned.

I gave up on buying the new floorstanding speakers - $500 more this month would leave me too poor to buy Christmas presents, go out occasionally, and eat. I find myself unwilling to forgo any of these things, in order to preserve, respectively, family harmony, domestic harmony, and stomach harmony. Still, the good news is the Mini Monitors do a great job on their own - obviously the deepest bass is missing, but overall I'll take it over the Logitech boom, mud and shriek any day. When I'm rich I'll either pick up some floor standers, if I can find another deal as good as the one I missed, or just get a decent sub, as I originally planned.

Today I rounded out the set up by getting a sound card for the PC in the setup. The onboard sound has digital output, but (if you're not a geek, tune out for the next sentence or so) it resamples everything to 48KHz, which is not good, and it didn't seem to want to do AC3 passthrough properly, so that wouldn't do. I got another Chaintech AV710 because it's cheap, it has digital out, doesn't resample, and AC3 passthrough works. Good enough for me! Took a bit of configuration file jiggling to get it working, so if you find this through Google or something and you're having trouble, get in touch and I'll pass on the tricks.

The $500 saved, of course, meant I could buy myself a little thing or two ;). So while I was at the mall the other day I picked up the complete Firefly series on DVD - I've been meaning to ever since I saw the movie (Serenity) and enjoyed it a lot. Having put the finishing touches on the Great Project I sat down and watched the first couple of episodes today, and they were excellent. I'm looking forward to watching the rest.

The parental units bought me a subscription to the Guardian Weekly for Christmas. What's even more pathetically middle class is that I appreciate it enormously...I never get around to buying a newspaper here, but I do miss reading it, so having one turn up weekly in handy tabloid size is perfect. The first issue came today, along with a postcard from the parents and siblings, who are in France, where my little sister is residing as part of her degree course. Instead of, for e.g., a scenic view of the town / country / asteroid, it depicts various forms of chocolate. I fear they know me too well.

We went out to dinner in Richmond a couple of nights ago with a bunch of people because one of our friends is returning to Japan soon. Mostly it was Chinese people, but she brought another Japanese person along. I was happy that I could follow substantial bits of their conversation despite being six feet away with large crowds of noisy Chinese people in the middle. Must be getting better, though from the sound of it I fear bellish has outstripped me by now. Was a bit surprised her friend didn't seem to have been to a hot pot restaurant before - "jibun de shabu shabu?" she asked, incredulous...

Being as no Canadian bank will countenance the idea of giving someone who isn't a permanent resident a credit card, I am very happy that Money Mart will be offering a prepaid Mastercard from next week. Finally I can buy stuff over the internet again. Wait. Is that a good thing?

Holy cow, I'm tired. And pissed.

I had a wonderful day today. Just wonderful. I spent the first two hours of it shopping in a horrible crowded mall. It's incredibly cold outside, so I had three layers of clothes, a thick hat and gloves on. The mall people aren't smart enough to figure out that most of their customers actually come from outside and will therefore be wearing very warm clothes, and that people shopping in malls don't generally take off most of their clothes and carry them around. So they have the thermostats set right up at 23 or something, which just means everyone in the mall is too hot and therefore too stressed and no-one is happy. Great for business, I'm sure.

Anyway. So I sweated my way around the mall and waddled home with seventeen metric tons of groceries. Through the cold.

But that was just the prelude. Having done that, I had to clean the house.

In our house, this mostly involves folding my partner's clothes. He has lots of clothes. His idea of storage is "make the piles on the floor really neat". So folding took quite some time. There's also the fact that he wears some really odd clothes, some of which appear to defy folding. How you fold a top which takes the form of a mostly circular piece of fabric with random straps attached to it, I don't know. Maybe I should call the maternal unit and see what she thinks. Anyway, once all the folding was done, all I had to do was tidy all the crap off the table. And the floors. And all the shelves. Then clean the table, and the floors, and the shelves. Then take two bags of trash and assorted recycling down to the basement. Then clean the kitchen. Then do the washing up. Then do the laundry.

Once THAT was done, I had to fiddle with the cables on the TV / playstation / HTPC Entertainment Complex in the living room. Then I was done! All I had to do after that was...my actual job. Which I just finished up, about 11p.m.

Around 10p.m. my partner arrived home from work, took in my epic efforts, and complained that the new entertainment complex arrangement meant he now has to press two buttons instead of one to watch TV while he sits on the couch, throws his clothes on the floor, eats, and turns the table into a large flat rubbish bin again.

Think loving thoughts. Loving...thoughts. Hatchets bad. Don't think about hatchets.

Oh well. At least I picked up the complete series DVD of Firefly while I was shopping, so I have something to sit and relax in front of tomorrow. And I'm not bloody well cleaning ANYTHING.

There's a traditional greeting for new members of head-fi, the headphone geek message board: "Welcome to head-fi. Sorry about your wallet." Most new members think it's a joke...for about two days. It refers to the tendency to come looking for a $30 pair of headphones to use with an iPod, and leave two years later with several thousand dollars of high end gear. So far I've managed to be quite conservative with actual headphone stuff - I've only spent a total of maybe $300 - but I find myself suffering from the wallet-emptying tendency now I'm buying some new speakers.

My original plan was to buy a Pioneer 815S receiver (cheap from Future Shop with Sammy's employee discount) and four Paradigm Titan speakers. These are very low-end hi-fi bookshelf speakers costing about $120 a pair.

Well, I got my first pair of Titans second hand with a little amp (can always find a use for an amp...) off the head-fi for sale forums for $120. Nice, everything going to plan!

Then I went to eBay to find another pair. There were a few ending soon, but hey, there was also a pair of Mini Monitors going for $150. Mini Monitors are the next level up in the Paradigm line, costing a bit over $300 a pair on average. So $150's a good price. I figured I had a bit of spare cash, so I thought I'd see if I could get these for cheap. I bid $192, and of course, that's exactly what I wound up paying for them. Plus $50 for shipping, and $60 to UPS. Whoops.

So now I've got two Mini Monitors and two Titans (still in transit). Am I satisfied?

Heh, silly reader.

I was thinking of picking up a sub to go with the new speakers - bookshelves are great for midrange and high end, but they only have one 5.5" woofer which covers both bass and low mids, so they don't quite get down to the deep bass. So I was looking around locally available stuff (don't fancy paying shipping on a 12" sub...) and came across a good deal on a pair of Monitor 9 speakers instead.

Now, these are ANOTHER few steps up in the Paradigm line. They're getting into the genuine hi-fi geek speaker range, albeit at the low end. They're serious, full-tower, floor standing speakers, with three drivers and reviews in Stereophile and everything. And they're only $500.

Well, I've got $500. I've not got much more, but...heck, who cares about that, right?!

I'm going out to UBC to have a listen to them on Tuesday or Wednesday. I suspect my wallet will be feeling very light when I come back. The Mini Monitors will be the rear speakers, and the Titans will end up in the bedroom connected to the little amp they're coming with. See, I told you you could always find a use for an amp...

sigh.

My new arrivals:

One (slightly battered) pair of Paradigm Mini Monitors, $200 plus shipping plus UPS "we're charging you because we can" fee = probably more than I'd have paid for a new pair locally, but oh well. Now I just need to wait till my rears (Paradigm Titans) arrive and I get paid so I can buy a receiver and a sub, and it'll be goodbye forever to my crappy Logitechs!

Miguel appears to have had a wouldn't it be cool if... moment. I have a horrible suspicion that a very similar post sent around inside Microsoft sometime last decade was the birth of ActiveX...