Fish Heirarchy

It's been hard to say why I haven't written all that often lately. There doesn't seem to be a single reason. I have been traveling internationally as of late. The demands of the assignment and the timezone change made my free time in the evening a rare occasion. Energy was equally difficult to come by. After a long day of trying to parse bits and snatches of a language that I can't quite understand, and composing a complex middleware solution, I barely could manage to hit the hotel gym each night. Furthermore, the little company I worked for has recently been merged with a larger company. While I don't want to get into details on a public forum, you can imagine the effect. Sunday afternoon I decided to purchase a new system, after more or less living out of other people's systems for almost a year. Like always, I had done extensive research into the matter. I wanted a laptop that was light, smaller, had visual style and a proper amount of power. Of course, it also had to run Linux. Laptops and Linux are often a hit-or-miss experience today. Compromises made by the manufacturer during the design process often result in "soft hardware" that requires special drivers to function. Some critical pieces of hardware fail to run at all under the open source OS. Thankfully, there are some vendors that know better and are willing to make at least one Linux compatible model. While I could have gone to speciality vendor such as System76, I decided to go with the ubiquitous (and more cost-effective) Dell. Specifically, a Dell Studio XPS M1340. Dell is a bit of a surprising choice for me. In the past I've considered their hardware generic and boring from a design perspective. Recently, however, they've put significant effort into changing that perception. The original XPS 1330 was a favorite of mine. The Adamo targets the "prosumer" with exceptional design. The Studio XPS I purchased originally shipped with Windows Vista. My lack of experience with it resulted in a number of BSODs and eventually a factory reinstall once I had resized the partitions. After about 24 hours, however, I had a nicely dual-booted system running Vista and Kubuntu 9.04.