I may need to rinse out my nose

Just got to school via a bus that had broken air circulation and a homeless person among the passengers who smelled so rank that the driver told her that the next time she's not allowed to come on the bus if she smelled like that. ("That" being a bit like a combination of the worst kind of those plastic stalls of temporary restroom and a tray dirty cat litter that has not been changed for a week -- I'm kind of fascinated-- in a horrified way -- by how that kind of intensity of smell can even be achieved.) (Also -- her voice -- what is wrong with it? It's like a combination of bad cold plus the cracking you get after you've screamed yourself hoarse. It speaks of extensive vocal cord damage. What happened?)

Now that I got that out of my system (my fellow passengers all looked fairly traumatized -- the bus driver kept telling us to open all the windows until we told her that all the windows are already open, and then she looked traumatized as well) -- I was originally going to blog about the other insanities of the week. Such as, for instance, how in the past week, I've helped a post-doc connect her computer to the school network, given advise to one of our undergrads about how to get rid of fleas that his roommate's cat has acquired, and hacked into the old Mac of the Mystery Password (formerly PI's computer, got donated to lab, no one, including the PI knew the password needed to update or install anything -- yes that one), setting up a new admin account, and updated / cleaned up the entire system (with due permission -- or at least with no objections from the rest of the lab) (guys, the security updates are about two years out of date). I'm the most proud of the last bit, given I've managed to cut down the start up time from 2 min and 15 sec to around 1 min and 5 sec when you restart (it's running os x 10.4.11 and the computer is old, with less than 1G of ram) and quartered (or more) the start up time for all apps I've tried except Firefox. (For some reason the updated version of firefox is sluggish. I have not been able to figure out why, only that it's not a network issue since Safari will open in five sec or less.) Onyx is a very good program for Mac system clean up, by the way. The PI has installed a new harddrive on the computer years and years ago and various people added various programs so essentially it's a mess, and running the app database reset option in Onyx, alone, has been enough to see a noticeable improvement in performance.

Before I forget: Stellarium (Ubuntu install) does not run on Daemon, on the account of the ATI card, which is a known bug that no one seemed to have found a solution for. There is, however, a Fedora install of Stellarium that does run on Ivy, and it's the shiniest new toy ever, since I discovered Gweled.


Also remember my question a while back about music organizers? I have tried out a few and decided that I quite like Mufin (for MS, and the icon is of a muffin wearing headphones, which I found to be utterly adorable) and Rhythmbox (for Linux). I have now discovered that I apparently have duplicate files of ten different songs in different folders and three other songs misnamed. I have also created what felt like far too many playlists and everything is all very organized, which is wonderful. Except at some point I'll have to deal with the music in the external but! Not today.

At some point I'll download and try out the Ubuntu install of Chrome on Daemon. About time, don't you think?

(Should I name my external hard drive?)

Right.