My life just flashed before my eyes. I was about to go get something in the next room, and I knocked my laptop off the balcony. Luckily, it didn't fall 12 feet down the other side but only about 3 and onto my foot. the LCD assembly sort of popped apart, but I put it back together. The dongle for the network card is, however, kaput. I have a nasty feeling that when I get back on campus they are going to try to force me to buy a whole new card to get a dongle. Hello, eBay...

azz sent me Xft patches for aewm. The anti-aliased text doesn't look nearly as nice as I thought it would, though, because I can only get X to display it in one font, which appears to be Courier New on crack. The bizarre thing is XftFontOpen always returns sucessfully, giving me this particular face, no matter what sort of garbage name I give it. Maybe the calling conventions are messed up. It uses very weird semantics, like

XftFontOpen(dpy, DefaultScreen(dpy),
    XFT_FAMILY, XftTypeString, foo,
    XFT_SIZE, XftTypeInteger, bar,
    NULL);

This is almost the same as XtVa*, but why in the world do we need to specify the type and the option name separately? Am I going to have a font family that's an integer? Who knows. Call me crazy, but I kinda like those hairy old X fontspecs.

Oh, and the aaronls of the world will probably have a field day with this (ahem):

        Stripped Bin /   RSS / Share
No Xft:          17k /  804k /  696k
With Xft:        69k / 1460k / 1108k

I have to admit the bin size is curious. It is, of course, dynamically linked, but I had to double-check just to be sure.

As I want to eventually release this thing at some point, I'm thoroughly self-LARTing myself for leaving my in- progress .deb work on my main computer (not on the network, as my dorm's power has been cut over break. Just when you thought these people couldn't be cheap enough... anyway...) I will have to remember what it was and reconstruct it if I want to be timely.

Since Iain did it (whoo, thanks for the excuse!), I might as well recap what I bought after meeting James for our keysigning yesterday.

• Rinocerose: Installation Sonore (this is incredibly good; it even cheers me up, which is no small feat)
• David Holmes: Bow Down To the Exit Sign
• Spring Heel Jack: Disappeared
• Medeski, Martin & Wood: The Dropper
• Speedy J: A Shocking Hobby
• PJ Harvey: Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea
• Underworld: Everything, Everything (disappointing)
• Reprazent: In The Mode (let's hear it for leaking MP3s before you finalize the track list...)
• Philip Glass: Symphony No. 3
• A Guy Called Gerald: Essence

And then I adopted the netcat Debian package. I'm pretty sure I've taken care of all the issues behind the 'normal' bugs with my upload, I'm just waiting on some responses from submitters. I'll get to the wishlist stuff pretty soon; it seems like a fun project. What I didn't realize when I started is that the last upstream release was in 1996, and I have my doubts that the author is going to reply to me. At any rate, the FTP site I supposedly downloaded the source from is down at the moment. I don't think I'd mind taking it over upstream if needed though. It's a cute little piece of software.

Finished housesitting this morning. I don't know why I find it surprising that I was asked, "could you upgrade AOL [motioning to CD, they even bundle them with the McNewspaper around here now...] while I'm gone? I don't know how to do it." Oh well.