Christmas eve has finally arrived! To some, Christmas brings emotions of relief or salvation. To others, it's just one of those days filled with obligatory social calls and commercialism.The days that precede Christmas have been as hectic as they possibly can. One one side I had to make some preparations for the social necessities. And on the other side there was the commercial aspect, in Christmas times known as 'desperately trying to find something to give to someone while moving to endless black crowds carrying baby buggies with loss of orientation and decency'.
If only had nothing else to do, I could fully indulge myself and study the strange mental state people get in while on a Christmas shopping spree...But, I had to attend also to more enlightened things such as coding my Shoes course assignments. The course is great and lots of fun. This is not just getting some exercises done. There is a great social aspect where you can interact with other coders and see solutions from other people, things you would have never thought of yourself. Also, having a skilled teacher who carries a contagious enthusiasm providing some excellent exercises helps to decrease the learning curve and keeps it fun! Unfortunately, the better must sometimes give way to the good...
But, if you are interested in learning some GUI programming, there is good news for you! The 3rd batch of the shoes programming course at Rubylearning has been announced, and it starts on 14 February. That's no holidays to bother you!
Throwing myself at the Christmas shopping crowd did pay off at the very end. The right presents were obtained, and to further add to the joy, I finally got hold of my own very ASUS EEE PC! After a disastrous adventure on eBay, countless disappointments in the shops, and a somewhat obsessive compulsive venture to the ugliest city of my country, I am pleased to announce: ladies and gentlemen: I got em. Apparently the very last, ASUS EEE PC 1000HD, and specially for Christmas: the white version! Unfortunately, _no_ shop in .nl sells the Linux version. Apparently consumers prefer to pay for a Windows license and the dreadful OEM CD instead of a nice 40GB SSD. Well, if the noise will start to bother, I guess I'll visit jkk mobile and put the SSD in myself. It's a relieve to find that ubuntu eee runs flawlessly and everything works like a charm. All adjustments have been made to resume my ruby coding and blogging as well.
The holiday's have not arrived for me yet though. Starting tomorrow I have the social calls to make and right after that I'll travel to Berlin for the 25C3. But there is one thing that's different in this busy week as opposed to the previous: an EEE with a full sized keyboard! I get to do some work while I'm wasting my time, finally salvation!
Marry Christmas!
