First, the Bad NewsTM:
- After falling asleep during a thunderstorm, my motherboard got fried.
- I’m no longer a university student.
- When payroll at my student job learns of #2, I’ll be out of a job too.
- Replacing the motherboard and getting a laptop (which must be done quickly in order to take advantage of fleeting student discounts) cost 3400 dollars.
- My bank restricts my transactions to something less than $3400, requiring some juggling of phone calls between them and Apple.
- The laptop is a PowerBook, which I ordered about two days before Jobs announced that Apple is ditching the PPC in favor of x86.
- An ATM machine ate my debit card after I had paid for all that junk above — leaving me the $20 I had just taken out as my sustinence until today.
- It’s rediculously hot in my apartment.
(I should probably note that the combination of the above situations has turned comical, with each situation individually infuriating and, at the same time, extremely trivial.)
Next, the Good NewsTM:
- I have much more time to actually do GNOME hackage.
- The LDAP/Samba PDC/CUPS stuff at work is up, running, and working well — next up is some server shuffling, moving a pair of Compaq desktop boxen that had been serving admirably as the firewall and SUS server to the lab, replacing the last of our NT4-based desktops.
- I finally have a nice laptop to ward^Wplay around with.
- X11 on breezy works great now.
- Sarge!
James Cape 
Don’t worry too much about the PowerBook and the x86 thing — the PowerBook will be love at first sight no matter what. Savour the opening of the box, it’s a heavenly experience 🙂
> I’m no longer a university student.
I hope that means you graduated but if it doesn’t then I wish you good luck.
Me I found a loophole and trasnferred into a similar course to prolong my stay at University.
Simplisticton: I’m not worrying about the PPC/x86 thing. I figure it’ll be a long while before OS X runs as well on x86 as it does on PPC — and I probably won’t be spending a lot of time in OS X anyways — the first thing I’m going to do with it is install Ubuntu.
Alan: Unfortunately it’s the latter. My close friends have been telling me that they knew me leaving college was a long time coming, opportunity to do what I want now, etc. Aside from the time/thought thing, the most obvious positive is that I no longer have gobs of money going to the university.