Probably no surprise to anyone, my home desktop computer runs Linux.



I recently posted Heatsink Bracket and Clips for new CPU cooler so I thought I ought to post more details about that system.


Here are the specs:

This Zalman is too loud:



Here is the funky bracket the Zalman uses:

Due to issues with shared web hosting plans (mostly due to insanely low apache MaxClients setting), I have moved all of my thatlinuxbox sites over to a Xen VPS solution offered by Linode.com (www.linode.com).  Linode compares well with SliceHost and other VPS providers, although Linode offers 360 MB RAM and 20 GB of disk space (the plan I chose) which gave them an edge in my comparison.

There is a lot more administration overhead with VPS compared to shared web hosting, but my sites actually work and I have flexibility to run whatever software I want including rsync and irssi.  I am very pleased so far and all of my sites are snappy again.

Here is the complete list of fiction that I read during 2009 (total of 84 works, mostly Speculative / Science Fiction):

 

I'm sure that other sites will do a better job of reviewing the Droid in-depth, so I will just give some impressions and post a few pictures.

Here are the first pics (note: Jabba is not to scale):

The Droid sitting next to my semi-ancient work-provided BlackBerry:

Leave unused cables in-place.  Do not use cable management.  Leave no cable unlabeled.

 

Use cables of appropriate length (this is a SCSI cable!):

It all started with me wanting to find "Science Fiction books published last month that were not about vampires."

According to the Amazon Advanced Search page, the minus sign "-" is supposed to indicate a "NOT" search.  I started by searching the books section for "-vampires".  Amazon says:

Your search "-vampires" did not match any products in: Books

Now I know that vampire books are popular these days, but I'm fairly certain there are at least a few Fantasy/SciFi books at Amazon.com that are not about vampires.

I tried again using the Advanced Search book search page (http://www.amazon.com/b/?node=241582011), making sure that "-vampires" was in the keywords field.  Again, no matching results.

I tried the "books written by Malcolm X but not an autobiography" search listed on the Advanced Search page as a Real-world Example... again no matching results.  Clicking the link to "See the results" of the example Malcom X search finds no matching results.

I looked all over the Amazon.com site for a way to report a web site problem.  None of the information at http://www.amazon.com/help was useful to report this kind of issue, at least as far as I could tell.  I was unable to locate any email contacts or web forms to submit feedback on the site itself.  I googled for other reports of this issue and didn't find anything. 

I resorted to emailing the generic webmaster address.

Here is the reply I received from Amazon:

Thank you, IKEA (Poang chair and stool, Expedit book shelf).