Parsed Participle

In search of coffee after a light dinner at a Manhattan Izakaya (probably on either 46^th or 47^th Street and Lexington Avenue), we stopped at Big Daddy's, a diner with Americana themes ranging from comic books to retro video games. Something on the menu caught my attention just before I was about to say "just a coffee for me". Frozen Black Cow! Despite not originally being in the mood for an ice cream soda, I simply had to try one, having learnt of it from the opening track of the Steely Dan album, Aja.

Another drink I know from a Steely Dan song, again one with rampant Manhattan imagery?

Bad Sneakers and a Piña Colada my friend
Stompin' on the avenue by Radio City with a
Transistor and a large sum of money to spend

After years of using laptops that I never actually owned (like my company issued T42, or the aging NEC La Vie that my landlady permanently loaned me), I finally have one that is really mine.

This is a ThinkPad X301 (see this ThinkWiki entry for non-biased specs). Probably not the sort of laptop you buy on a grad-student budget, but it was available for a discount at the University computer store.

Debian 'Lenny' is now happily running on it, no major problems in installation or configuration except:

• Wifi is non-free. I overlooked the fact that Intel wifi drivers need proprietary firmware blobs. It works but to depend on the non-free firmware is a shame. Customizing the laptop from Levovo directly may have yielded some free (albeit costlier) options. I wonder what other non-free devices I may encounter. I'm happy with whatever is working out-of-the-box, though.
• There is a stupid glitch that prevents me from using the TrackPad (unless I choose to sacrifice the wonderful TrackPoint scrolling feature famously associated with ThinkPads). This is a problem only for distributions that use fully HAL-automated hardware configuration; it is too late, however, to revert to hand-customized configuration files (xorg.conf, etc).
• Minor suspend/resume issues which I am sure will smoothen out soon.