Dang. Just when I was getting used to being a bitter, old fart the shop sends me a brand new and shiny IBM ThinkPad X31 to replace the one that’s been giving me all those gray hairs ;-)

The Sun is shining, the birds are singing, my Internet connection is functional, next week is Autumn holiday here – and emerge is ticking away on the new lappy. Could life possibly be any better?

Friday I finally received my IBM X31 in the mail after it was repaired for the second time in a row. This time it even booted when I turned it on! Hooray! But my celebration was short-lived. Mere minutes after I had turned it on it crashed and died – same problem as when I sent it in for repairs in the first place. Sigh.

I immediately phoned the shop who did the repairs and asked for an explanation. Luckily (for them, that is) they accepted my proposal of getting a new laptop instead of them trying to repair the broken motherboard a third time. So today I shipped my otherwise trusty IBM X31 to the shop one final time (fingers crossed) – hopefully to receive a new X31 by mail within days… Good thing this laptop is under a 3 year warranty!

Oh, and hopefully my Internet connection at home will be restored tomorrow, so things are starting to look bright again :)

Sigh.

I still haven’t had my laptop back from it’s second repairs, yesterday my bike had a flat tire and today my Internet connection at home died due to some workers in white overalls cutting our phone lines by accident…

So here I am – stuck with no laptop, no Internet connection and no bike to take for a spin. Is someone trying to tell me something? Do I really have to do the dishes and clean the apartment?

The mobile herd has traditionally been the maintainer of GPS (as in Global Positioning System) related packages in Gentoo Portage, but unfortunately, no one in the mobile herd currently has access to a GPS receiver to test with.

About five months ago I opened a meta-bug (#90848) for keeping track of all the GPS related bug reports and enhancement requests currently in our Bugzilla – before I reassigned them all to the maintainer-{wanted,needed} aliases. I also had a position for GPS packages mantainer added to our staffing needs page and notified the gentoo-dev@ mailing list of us being short of a GPS maintainer.

To this point, nobody has stepped up to take the position of GPS maintainer, so I’d like to put out a wish list for a GPS receiver (preferably a Garmin GPS with USB connection) so that I can maintain these packages myself.

Should you wish to donate such a device to me, please contact me.