This is apparently my life

The mp3 music player system in Onyx is fairly good in terms of sound quality, and the navigation was simple enough that I've been able to figure out everything I wanted to do thus far without reading the manual (me not reading a manual = shocking, yes). However, what is a disadvantageous compared to the other mp3 players I've had so far is the delay. There is an inevitable three second delay between when I press a button and when the task starts and I have no idea why. It is annoying, though not debilitating, I suppose. Or at least not yet. It is possible that with more usage it will be the thing that will drive me insane.

I have also discovered a Roomba in a corner of the room. What appears to have happened is that dad inherited from one of his friends, and that it doesn't work, in the sense that it fails to charge. It's a Roomba Discovery and I'm currently recharging it, after a battery reset, to see if that works. Meanwhile I can't help but think of the Questionable Content comic. (OhmigodwherecanIfindmini-jet-engines?)

Have installed mp3 plugin support on Fedora 14. Apparently all I needed to do was to su to root and then type:

rpm -ivh http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-stable.noarch.rpm
yum install gstreamer-plugins-bad gstreamer-ffmpeg gstreamer-plugins-ugly -y

and viola.
Flash plugin support was a bit longer and I did it while at Lucy's, before we watched THE MATRIX. I'm pretty sure this is what I did, as root:

rpm -ivh http://linuxdownload.adobe.com/adobe-release/adobe-release-i386-1.0-1.noarch.rpm
rpm --import /etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-adobe-linux
yum check-update
yum install flash-plugin nspluginwrapper.x86_64 \
nspluginwrapper.i686 alsa-plugins-pulseaudio.i686 libcurl.i686

Firefox theme and personnas are excellent in Linux, I still prefer QuickJava to NoScript. I got QuickProxy but haven't set it up yet because I haven't needed to access any sciency journals yet. The issue with gmail that I noticed while at Lucy's went away by itself. (??) But the lack of UK-based spell checker in Firefox right now is apparently because there's no working spellchecker, despite of the fact that that option is checked under preferences, so I'll have to sort that out because my spelling is rather atrocious and having something underlined in red at least narrows down the range of things I have to check over, even when I'm typing made-up works such as "sciency" and "phosphorylation".

(The Roomba makes such cute little noises.)

In an earlier discussion with my parents on my life in grad school, mother wanted to know whether or not my thesis advisor is still enthusiastic about my thesis. I was able to reply, with complete honesty, that he is more enthusiastic than I am. My parents were reassured by this. I was trying not to laugh.

Does Smurfs merchandise induce the feeling of nostalgia in anyone besides me?