At home I've recently switched from Gentoo to Debian[0]. And after getting profoundly annoyed after having searched for "backport" for the 300th time, I moved up to the testing class distribution. Apparently during the upgrade fontconfig wound up in a rather unique and highly nonfunctional state[1]. So, after purging and reinstalling fontconfig I now have a nice debian box that has pretty fonts[2].
I also learned how to change the battery in my car. It was easy once I broke down and bought the long-neck socket set[3]. Of course, 8:00pm on a Friday night was not my preferred time to find out that my battery wasn't functioning correctly[4].
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[0] Gentoo is still a very cool distro, but it seems like it has a very high bit-rot factor and everything always seemed to run slowly. It really comes down to preferring to spend my time doing other things than maintain my system (especially if maintaining my system potentially involves waiting for mozilla to build)
[1] Running fc-list resulted in a core dump. Running gaim resulted in a core dump. Running mozilla-firebird resulted in a core dump. Note the subtle pattern.
[2] At least until I break it.
[3] Yes, I needed a deeper socket in order to get my nuts loose, that's what happens when you have a big shaft coming up through the middle.
[4] I jumped it in the parking garage (thank you, AAA!) and then ran it for half an hour. It didn't charge up enough to restart the car (or honk the horn at full volume) after half an hour and it didn't drain out completely overnight. So either the battery's gotten old, or there's something expensive wrong with the car.
Posted by matt at October 19, 2003 03:57 AMY'know, if you post (3)as part of a personal ad, that might just *ahem* 'jump-start' things for you...
Posted by: Beth at October 19, 2003 10:41 AM