Pat Condell really doesn’t like that UN resolution

I blogged about the resolution earlier. With that background knowledge, here’s one man’s feelings on the matter:

I appreciate the finer things in life

Or, to restate the subject, I seem to be following in Sheepy’s footsteps and become a snob with respect to many things (starting with beer, which I owe to her).

• I’m definitely a beer snob. I won’t drink the cheap macrobrews (Molson, Keith’s, Bud, Labatt, etc.). I just won’t touch them. The last time I had a glass of Heineken (free at an office party), I had a sip or two and poured the rest down the sink.

  Give me rich, full-bodied ales, not insipid lagers; give me dark ales and porters and stouts. Give me microbrews, give me variety, give me beers with flavours to interest the palate rather than bland swill designed not to have any positive qualities, but only to avoid offending. And keep your rice out of my beer.

  Current favourites include Traquair’s House Ale and Jacobite Ale, Lìa Fail, and (much to my surprise) Granville Island’s winter ale (their regular selection leaves me indifferent); but I change my mind rather frequently. I crave variety.

• Whisky? Give me a single malt, a finger or so in my glass, neat if you please. Current favourite: Glenlivet (I believe mine’s a 10-year-old).

• I don’t know much about wine, but I’m starting to very much enjoy them—red wines in particular. One would think I might enjoy Merlot, or perhaps Cabernet Sauvignon—varieties whereof you can find perfectly drinkable representatives at very reasonable prices. …But no, of course not. I enjoy some cabs, but I dislike Merlot, and my favourites are other wines altogether.

  After long being a fan of Chianti, my new favourite type of wine is Meritage—in particular, left bank Bordeaux style wines. These are usually a blend of Merlot, Cabernet Sauvignon, and some third variety such as Médoc; left bank ones tend to be predominantly Cabernet. I don’t insist at actually having wines from Bordeaux, and there are some very good Meritage wines from elsewhere. The Red Rooster winery in the Okanagan Valley here in BC makes an excellent Meritage. This is a lot cheaper than real French wines, but it still isn’t like picking up the cheapest drinkable Merlot at the liquor store.

• Coffee—damn it, coffee, too. I was able for a long time to enjoy the free coffee at the office, but thanks to the Other Sarah, my morning coffee at work is now purchased every morning from Caffè Artigiano, who make seriously good espresso beverages. As for drip coffee, I no longer buy it except at Caffè Calabria on the Drive. I don’t know what they do with their beans, but it’s heavenly.

While this is, of course, chiefly an excuse to mention the stuff I like and covertly recommend that you all try them, I can’t help but feel that it’s a bit of a pain sometimes. If I didn’t appreciate the finer things in life, as I put it with intentional pretentiousness, I could buy wine at half the price I often pay, beer at a third the price, and get my coffee entirely for free.

Buying a laptop—please advice!

My old Dell 600m has gone past being long in the tooth to being pretty much toothless (it’s old and slow, the optical drive is long since dead, and when I adjust my screen brightness, the keyboard tends to die). I’ve got my finances in check, I have some money, and it’s time to start thinking upgrade.

Of course, I’ll be looking for a laptop to run Linux. I want a 15"/15.4" screen (less is annoyingly small, more is annoyingly un-portable), I want a nice big hard drive, reasonable performance until I upgrade next time (which may be years), the ability to hook it up to my TV (or somebody else’s) to play movies, and crucially, I need the hardware to be supported by Linux.

Researching compatibility can be pretty tedious. This was the initial reason why I started looking at companies that ship pre-loaded Linux laptops…though on reflection, I’d also be very happy to support that decision of theirs with my business; the world could use more of it. I’ve found some very nice-looking laptops, such as the system76 Pangolin Performance and Serval Professional, or the ZaReason Strata 4660.

I really like the system76 machines, and they seem to have a very good reputation. The only problem is the battery life—the Pangolin is rated at 3 hours (which, of course, is never realistic; their sales guy was frank and told me that 1.5–2 hours is probably what I’d get), and due to supplier shortages, they don’t offer a 9-cell option. All of these systems are also a bit on the heavy side (in the approximate range of 6–7 lbs). I’d like something as light as possible for my backpack, but of course the 15.4" laptops aren’t going to weigh the same as 12.1" ultraportables…

There are other Linux laptop resellers, like Puget Systems, and of course there’s the route of buying a “regular” laptop, maybe a Thinkpad for quality or something like a Dell for price, and making sure that the model I get is fully supported in Linux. But I’m no laptop expert, I haven’t shopped around in a long time, and I don’t know what to look for—what kind of battery life should I hope for in a 15.4" laptop? What’s a reasonable, and what’s a good weight?

Any and all thoughts and suggestions are welcome at this stage.

[Poll #1367807]

Update: The Puget 510i doesn’t look like that much of a contender. Its battery life is also in the 1.5–2 hours class, and at that point I think I’d just go with the system76.