[link]

Less fiddly hack. This scraping guy is not the first one.

Minesweeper...the Movie. [link]

Man, getting a 500 gig drive is like finally having room to *breathe.* I've spent the last three or four days backing up the Dell, wiping it and dual-booting XP and Kubuntu; backing up both the 60 and 80 gig drives, which were NTFS and Mac OS Extended respectively, so I could wipe them and format them in FAT32, which I have been kicking myself over for a *year* for not doing when I initially got them; backing up the iPod video and wiping it; and finally downloading and re-downloading all the stuff I had to watch and delete or didn't have a chance to download since last summer. It's ridiculously liberating--and time-consuming! But so worth it.

The 80 gig drive was a lovely LaCie Porche-design drive, which has done me well so far. The 500 gig is the same kind, only larger, of course. I was trying to think of a good way to protect it for the flight back to England, and while I was at Goodwill the other day I picked up a discarded zippered pencil case, which apparently belonged to a child named Daniel who had whiled away his time scraping crayon onto the top of the thing. But I have to say, it encases the drive like it was *made* for it. I added some of the foam packaging that came with the drive's box, and it's snug with no sharp corners--perfect for hauling into an overhead compartment. Bless Goodwill and all its oddities.

Hivemind question: I have an Acer 5040 laptop with an AMD Turion and broadcom g internal wifi modem. I am trying to get on a LEAP authenticated network, and I've been told that my modem is not LEAP certified so it won't work. Now I need to buy a new internal wifi modem. What's the difference between mini-PC cards and expess mini cards, and how do I determine which one will fit in my laptop? Also will intel cards work with my athlon processer?

ETA: Never mind, I got the broadcom to work with LEAP.

Huh. The nova that was supr all those years ago has returned.

Ok. Feeling very stupid, but what does this error message mean? I'm afraid it means something very bad...

"Another wireless network utilty is communicating with the Intel PRO/Wireless adapter?"

Really small thing that irritates me: I am on a windows XP machine at work. Somehow the default for looking at folders in My Computer is tiles. I like lists. Is there a way to change the default?

Look under the View menu, flea. There should be an option for both List and Details.

vw, what OS are you using?

Taking the message to be correct, it doesn't necessarily sound terrible. Sounds like two different programs are trying to use the wireless adapter at the same time. Which is odd, as normally the OS would have direct control over the adapter and all programs that need internet access would go though the OS. So possibly some network utility you don't know about is trying to get direct access to the wireless?

Anyway, that's the theory....