Nearly the end of the week..

[ellenmillion]

Just another half hour or so, one stop at the store, a load of water, and then I get a weekend.

The critical orders are all out. In fact, ALL the orders may be out, I'll have to check. (I think another one snuck in while I was filling them...) Totally had an all-out fight with one of the orders, ended up upgrading the client to Express mail to make up for the delay at my end. Everything else went pretty smoothly. Stacks and stacks of boxes went out.

Did my dayjob time, wrote an O&M manual, did a set of as-builts, and other fun things, desperately need to restock my snack drawer, and really dig my new work computer setup.

Home computer is chugging along. Still trying to decide what to do to replace the ailing laptop - M$ really jumped the shark when they went to Vista, the fools.

Email's misbehaving.

Hot water rocks.

Shower is *this* close to being connected.

Snowing buckets, roads are very bad.

Plan to weekend on my weekend. Behind on lots of stuff, including emails and advertising things, but also very tired and flirting with burnout, and I'd like to stay sane*, thanks.


*Actual sanity may vary...

Comments

[waltzingdog.livejournal.com]

............snow? Did you say snow?
Around here we're still waiting for October to behave like, well, October. We set another record temp yesterday...
... Record high temperature set at Raleigh-Durham Intl Airport for
Thursday October 18...
A record high temperature of 85 degrees was set at Raleigh-Durham
Intl Airport Thursday. This broke the old record of 84 set in 1947.
*hugs*
~Wendy (wishing for snow)

[ellenmillion.livejournal.com]

Snow! Maybe 6 inches of it! It's beautiful. *rubs it in a little* :P I'll take pictures tomorrow.

[theroach.livejournal.com]

Yes, Vista is a PITA. Even my boss (who was a fervent supporter of Vista before itwas sold publically) curses it now. But in Europ, people have an option of 'downgrading' to XP. Is there a similar option in the US?

Alternatively, you might try to check out Linux, which has become more popular in Europe. For your purposes, I think you need to check out support for your printer(s) on linuxprintingorg - they have a huge database of printers and whether they are supported by Linux. If your printer is a PostScript one, you should have little problems, Linux was the first OS to support PostScript the way it was intended to be)

As to which Linux, that's a matter of taste mostly. In Europe, Suse Linux and Ubuntu are popular, ISTR that in the US, Red Hat / Fedora has a larger following.

[ellenmillion.livejournal.com]

Software is holding me back. I just got Creative Suite 3 for windows, and I also run AutoCAD, and I'm guessing that neither of those run on Linux. (Do they??) Since either one of those programs by itself costs - literally - as much or more than a new machine, they're pretty much limiting me. Otherwise, I love the sound of Linux. I know a lot of people who swear by it.

[valdary.livejournal.com]

http://architectafrica.com/bin0/news200411111_wine.html
http://www.winehq.org/pipermail/wine-devel/2006-April/046710.html


there is a simulator called Wine that can run some windoze programs on Linux, the main problem with it is that because you are runing a simulation of a computer within your computer it eats processing power. But if you are updating to a powerful comp that might not be an issue.

you can also get pythonCAD http://www.pythoncad.org/
or
Qcad http://www.ribbonsoft.com/qcad.html
(but I think they may charge money for Qcad

Do you have a LUG near you? (linux users group) find a friendly geek and I'm sure they could help you fix it up

Support for printers and scanners you'll have to check on but if you google it there are sites you can check it on. Mostly it depends wether the manufacturer will release the firmware so that you can copy it into the backend of the program. Having said that if it is supported you may be impressed. Running my scanner on xsane in GNU Linux gives me a quality of scan that knocks the windows program out of the water, better colours, clearer scan even higher dpi options.