Up at 4am, need lit keyboad

keep moving the display down to light up the nonlit keyboard on the D430, Apple has it right in lighting up the keyboard on some models, we do use our laptops in the dark sometimes, when we insomniacs start blogging. was thinking of approaching the Church ac cross the street as a venue to have LiLAX meet and educate a whole new membership into the virtues of open source and free software. I could hand out Ubuntu CDs and answer questions on Linux, maybe even have a workshop on how to convert from Windows. So I guess I should approach them today. I not up out of choice, got woken up and then after that my mind just started thinking.

So I have this laptop for the weekend, wish I could keep it, it is nice and clean new and factory installed, Windows has this bad habit of degrading with time, I am sure this one will too, but in the meantime it rocks! Lets try dualbooting Ubuntu, darn, didn't bring a DVD drive home :( On the other hand I could install Open Office on it, but I heard bad things about OO on Vista, might try out the free downloadable Office 2007, for 60 days, then you have to pay more then $400 for a copy, messed up, if Dell has shipped it would be cheaper. So again, seems like the choice might be to simply try Ubuntu for the whole thing, I checked and this hardware is tested to work with it, but I bit little details like battery life might suffer.

I spent some time with some great people, but clueless about computers. I finally decided to move Leo over to his new computer, when I say new it runs Win2K, but it has a Gig of RAM, I don't really know how old it really is, probably doesn't predate XP, but then again who really knows, maybe David who built this monster. I thought it was high time that he make use of the best hardware he has. Leo teaches at our old LiLAX meeting place and I got his number from David who didn't have time to consult. So I spend time there every few months trying to help out with their home office computers. Easy job, but rewarding as they seem to dislike setting up these systems.

So as a comparison I decided to test my home cable modem with Road Runner.
Pretty bad in comparison, but enough for what I do.