<OT> I love my wife...

[Jerry McBride]

Ok you guys... it's one day past christmas and I have a quiet moment I can 
spend with you...

Santa was very nice to me this year. Probably one of the best gifts I got was 
a shiney new COMPAQ R3320US laptop. Sports a 3Ghz P4, 512M ram, 60G hdd and 
one of those mile wide lcd screens... Wifey bought it for me. She was so 
proud to hand it to me last night that I didn't have the heart to tell her 
that I could have gotten one from work for nothing... <VBG> Except it would 
have been the amd 64bit speed boatd instead of Intels finest.

Anyways, I spent part of the day playing with my new laptop and I just gotta 
share some insights with you. First off, Hyper Transport, where in when 
enabled, linux will report two cpu's instead of one... It's sucks, just like 
I figured it would. Never mind the fact that the alsasound driver for this 
laptop fails to load while in smp mode, but overall performance takes a nose 
dive when both "pretend" cpu's are enabled. Just waiting for the laptop to 
full boot, shutdown or just compile a kernel with it enabled is like watching 
a slow motion movie... And this is a selling point for the P4s???

Anyways, I now have the kernel configed for a single cpu and it flies like I 
would expect, not to mention that the required alsa sound driver loads 
normally now. All it all, it's a nice piece of hardware, I'm going to love 
getting it running 100% under Gentoo linux.

I just wish wifey had said something to me, I'd have been able to save her a 
few bucks.

Oh.,.. my second favorite gift came from my nearest neighbor, Gavin. He gave 
me a fifth of Jack Daniel. Wow, that's what I call a good neighbor. Later on 
tonight I'm going to pay him a visit and we can share a few sips together.

Ladies, Gentlemen, 2005 has been a wonderful year for my family and I, 
hopefully for you and yours too. I wish you all a good new years.

God Bless, Jerry, Linda and John.