(U.S. only:) If ever there was a time to call your Senators, at 888-355-3588, this is it: demand he or she do everything possible to scotch Alito's appointment to the Supreme Court. Make clear that you see him as an immediate threat to American democracy. This isn't a partisan issue: the rule of law is necessary for everyone who's not a criminal, and most of them, too. (I called my Senators for the first time ever, this week.)

My brother, without checking with me first, bought a laptop, and then asked me to get Linux up on it. I put Ubuntu GNU/Linux "Dapper" on his Toshiba Satellite M45-359, and wrote up the experience of the subsequent three weeks getting it in trim. In short, everything works (incl. sleep mode, XVideo and DRI GL, wireless, CD/DVD burner, audio, USB2) except the CardBus (PCMCIA) slot and the FlashMedia (MMC/SD/SM) slot. Both of those ought to start working when the TI PCIxx21 chip gets driver support. No doubt DMA on SATA ATAPI will work soon, too; in the meantime it's using a slow and CPU-hungry PIO mode. All this is on the vanilla Ubuntu 2.6.15 kernel package. It really shouldn't have taken so much work, but Ubuntu made it a lot better than it might have been. I am still working on getting wireless networking to self-configure, though.

Congratulations to the people working on the TI ACX-111 wireless driver. For the first time, the LinkSys WPC54G (v2) CardBus 802.11b/g gadget I bought more-or-less by accident in July finally works, and I can retire my pile of used Orinoco cards. (Beware, v3 has a different chip.)

As part of getting the Toshiba working, I discovered that all my Synaptics touchpads will do a "click middle button" and "click right button" if you tap the upper- and (respectively) lower-right corners of the pad.

I just found out about Philip Pullman and "His Dark Materials", aimed at a similar audience as -- but by all accounts much, much better than -- "Lord of the Rings" and "Chronicles of Narnia". On a (barely) related note, I got my copy of Terry Bisson's "Pirates of the Universe" that I bought direct from the author, a curiously satisfying transaction.

pcolijn: The path of least resistance really is to proceed to Emacs -- but you needn't give up your hard-earned Vi chops. Standard-issue Emacs comes with "viper-mode", a "major mode" that is a very respectable (and respectful) implementation of Vi. Remarkably, despite its true Vi-ness, regular Emacs commands still work! Against all reasonable expectation, the key assignments for the two editors are very nearly disjoint, except where they actually coincide (e.g. arrow keys).