Greetings from alt.polycon!

[baratron]

I am so far behind with livejournal - both reading and posting. I have a bunch of half-written writeups about panels here & cool things people said, which I'll try to drag into shape before I get home. Theoretically I should start posting to alt.poly again (if only for a few weeks) but I need a decent pointy-clicky newsgroup reader that supports threading properly & has a killfile. What you won't be seeing from me are any posts about Las Vegas itself. The Strip is so colossally over the top that it broke my brain, and all I can really do is post the photos with comments and let you draw your own conclusions.

the_ogre is my new guru and spiritual leader. He managed to fix the main thing that was wrong with the laptop (refusing to boot) in minutes. It turned out to be an entirely moronic problem. I have an SD card adapter which allows me to plug the Micro SD card from my phone into the laptop. This was being stored in one of the EeePC's SD card slots. For some reason, it is configured by default to boot off the SD card in preference to flash or USB drives. For some reason, it was unable to sense that the SD card adapter was just an adapter, not a card, so kept checking it to see if it was bootable and could not progress beyond that. Popping out the card completely cured the problem. Duh. The touchpad is still broken, owing to the fact the connector is held on by sticky tape as shipped, but this was curable by buying a US $12.99 mini USB mouse.

Currently the weather here is absolutely awful (sandstorms), and several people who left for the airport have had their flights cancelled and come back to the con. I hope this isn't still going to be the case tomorrow. I'm at the stage of holiday where I really want to stay here with all the shiny people, but I also really do want to get home and hug my Richard.

Comments

Greetings from McCarran Airport!

[kshandra]

I got rebooked on a 1900 flight to San Francisco; wild_irises and alanbostick are both here, as well. But I just heard from someone next to me that they're still waiting for a pilot to arrive for their 1614 flight to Calgary, so I may yet wind up back at the hotel....

[nitoda]

good luck with flights etc! Glad to hear the problem with the eeePc was so elementary - not so glad to hear about the touchpad problems. I would hate having to use a mouse with a laptop - I'd need to actually use it on a flat surface and not on my lap! ;-) Yes, I know you're supposed to anyway, but I like the freedom of having it in my lap for short periods while watching TV and inbetween rows of knitting for instance.

[otterylexa.livejournal.com]

Just a point: a laser mouse works fine on my knee when I'm wearing clothes, though not so well when I'm not.

[rhialto.livejournal.com]

I see a big potential market here!