My super-generous brother swapped out my crappy problematic System76 PanP7 this past weekend. As a result, I now have a brawny top-of-the-line quad core i7 8GB RAM Toshiba Satellite P750 with Dolby advanced audio and Harman/Kardon speakers. I have no idea why anyone would go through with this completely imbalanced swap but he did. It defies all logic. I guess I will always remain the little kid in the family who makes rotten decisions and constantly needs rescue.

And so I am back on Fedora 15 lovelock. Because that is my brother's preferred linux distro. Apparently he has now brute-forced F15 on the System76. I hope it works out for him. Since he has an internet connection that matches the century we live in (as opposed to the paleolithic lowly dial-up equivalent DSL that I have), the laptop didn't have any mp3 or ape codecs (because he streams all his media from the cloud).

Thankfully there is an easy way to make it old-world compatible.

In the terminal, type:

sudo c

rpm -ivh http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-stable.noarch.rpm

rpm -ivh http://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-stable.noarch.rpm

yum -y install gstreamer-plugins-bad gstreamer-plugins-ugly xine-lib-extras-nonfree gstreamer-ffmpeg

I said Hi to Chris Rock early yesterday morning in the Highline Park. I was so surprised that I didn't really say anything much. I just said

Hiiiii!

like a stupid teenager.

After all the musings about what I would say if I ever ran across a hollywood star I really like, I just managed an extended single syllable.

He did say hello back, but what a ridiculously generic thing to say!

I got an email from (e:enknot) today morning. He is getting Amazon prime membership. He wants 5 more folks to join so that costs could be lower for everyone for the same kind of benefits. Sounds pretty good, but I am unfortunately passing on this very generous offer.

I had Amazon Prime for the whole of last year. It made me buy all sorts of irrational things, really. There was an element of thrill in getting something delivered in 2 days flat.

Then the wok drama happened (e:tinypliny,54693) I know this is probably going to sound petty. But the wok was in my shopping cart and I was definitely going to buy it that day. The price suddenly spiked up more than 2x the original cost just as I was taking the preliminary steps to go through the checkout process (And no, I don't have the one click magic phrase because I think it's such nonsense)!

I sent a nasty letter of complaint to Amazon and heard back from the customer service team. According to them the prices on Amazon are fair market prices (or something to that effect) and it's not under their control. I was annoyed and deleted the wok from the shopping cart. Needless to say the wok magically sprang back to its original lower price when I did.

If this had happened once or even twice I would have overlooked it but this kind of price jumping has happened quite a few times for me in the past. They definitely monitor the shopping carts of people in general (because I receive target email that explicitly says that it is for things related to the ones in my shopping cart). I think that when a critical mass of people have some item in their shopping cart, they try and increase profits with some atrocious price change. Of course, this is only a theory and a bitter one at that. I have no evidence but that is what the whole thing feels like to me.

I think most people research to at least some level before they buy things (unless it's a hasty impulse buy). ALL of my "big" purchase (above $80 for me) are well considered. Unless it's for necessary travel or something related to my immediate family I don't make impulse buys, on principle. I am morbidly scared of the "accumulation tax" that follows me around if I accumulate ridiculous junk with little purpose. So I know exactly what I am going to be spending on anything ages before I actually buy it. If I am not careful and just spend willy-nilly (I have in the past), the consequences are sometimes quite embarrassing (for e.g., rent cheque bouncing or some such stupid financial faux pas).

Given this level of thought that goes into what I buy, I appreciate it if the prices are stable. If Amazon or any other merchant thinks they should charge something for an item, they should just go ahead and tag it with that price instead of changing prices all the time. Unfavourable price changes makes customers who research annoyed and gives them an unsettling sense of not buying well. Favourable price changes makes them feel like they got a bargain - a kind of shifty emotional maneuvering to make them buy more impulsively. I know Amazon is not the only one that engages in all the price jumping but I just wanted to blow off some steam about the wok incident. ;-)

I ended up buying the wok from Overstock and not renewing my membership with Amazon. Thus far, I have bought 2 other beautiful fry pans and a sewing machine from Overstock. Each time the customer service has been exemplary and flawless. Sure, the deliveries take longer than 2 days but seriously, my kitchen is not going to implode if a frying pan (or really anything) that I have wanted for 3 or more months takes a few more days to arrive.

I have a massive paleolithic joke of an internet speed to even consider video on demand. Plus I don't like watching anything passively for more than 15 minutes anyway. I have some kind of an attention deficit when it comes to television. It's too impersonal and I am too guilt-ridden.

I read this article with interest:


To me, it represents a global dilemma. Would you rather live in the past and insist that change is disturbing because you don't quite understand it (or want to take the pains to understand it) or would you just accept that the future is here and evolve with it?

The way I have phrased it above makes it sound as if the right answer is choosing the future and evolving. That is because I want to choose that answer. I want everyone to choose that answer. But sometimes, there is no right answer to a question like this. The article about Moroccan cuisine cookbooks illustrates this point so well.

On an aside, I really want to make this bread someday:


Maybe I can this weekend.

What I want to do is match strings with regular expressions.

^ : start of string
[ : beginning of character group
a-z : any lowercase letter
A-Z : any uppercase letter
0-9 : any digit
_ : underscore
] : end of character group
* : zero or more of the given characters
$ : end of string

Now I can't even write code for matching a variable length sentence or phrase in curly brackets for example:

{A quick brown FOX jumps over a sprightly hare}

Hmm... this does not work
(\{)[.*?](\})

This doesn't work
(\\{).*?(\\})

This doesn't work either.
\\{.*?\\}

ARRRGH.
It's funny how it's called regular.

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