Well, another thursday, another hacking society. Decided that I had been to the Southern Sun too much of late, so I went up to Boulder early and hit the Tandori Grill for dinner. Very nice. The Chicken Tkia Masala (spicy) was pretty spicy and yummy. Garlic Nann was also good. They got mobbed just as I was finishing up, but got pretty good service until then. I left there and went up to the Southern Sun to see if anyone was there and ran into rise. He said no one else was there, and the wait for a table was more than an hour, so we just went over to Caffe Sole instead. This brings me to the laptop woes.

My laptop has been flaky of late. I had it marked down to the swsusp patches I had been playing with, but when I woke up this morning my laptop was locked up. Looks like it locked at about 3am (which is when my backups fire off). It was blinking the num lock light which indicates a panic, but of course the screen was blanked. When I powered it down and back on it wouldn't even come up, just turned off. Finally it came up. Tonight when I got to Caffe Sole it came up ok, but then it decided to spew a disk error and mark the drive read only. :( I shut it down and ran a fsck.jfs on it, and it came up ok after that. Sure looks like the drive is hosing up, which is strange since I just got this new drive in december. They sure don't make them like they used to. I did take it out of the laptop and re-seat it and it sounds a lot quieter, perhaps it was just a connector. The other possible weird thing that could be causing problems is my USB wireless. I have switched that off for now and am using a pcmcia one, so that should tell me if thats the culprit.

Of course since my laptop is my main machine (I am on it probibly 18 hours a day) I looked around to see if I could see a good replacement one. The HP zt3000 looks pretty sweet. You can get a 1980x1200 screen in a 15.3" form factor. Seems to run linux pretty well and it's about 6.5 lbs. The downside is that it's only got at best a 1.7ghz p4 in it, which would in fact be slower than my current 1.8ghz. They even have a credit card buy deal that would let you pay 0% interest if you pay it all off in 12 months. Tempting, but I really like my current laptop if I could get it stable.