The delivery situation with my laptop illustrates one of the key points with ordering things, be they laptops or books -- do not ever pay money for faster shipping. Yesterday, my laptop left Kunshan, China. Today, my laptop is in Pittsburgh, on a truck to be delivered to my office at CMU. I went with the free, slowest shipping option. Hurrah!

For the curious, here's the timetable:

• 17 Nov 13:41 Some China time - Picked up in Kunchan, China
• 17 Nov 13:55 Some China time - Reached Fedex location in Kunshan
• 17 Nov 13:19 Alaska time - Reached Anchorage, Alaska
• 17 Nov 16:06 Alaska time - Left Anchorage
• 18 Nov 01:19 U.S. central time - Arrived in Indianapolis, Indiana
• 18 Nov 05:48 U.S. central time - Left Indianapolis, Indiana
• 18 Nov 06:03 U.S. eastern time - Arrive in Pittsburgh sort facility
• 18 Nov 07:29 U.S. eastern time - Arrive in Pittsburgh local FeEx office
• 18 Nov 08:07 U.S. eastern time - On truck for delivery to CMU

Amazing. It's not *quite* as amazing as one would think because the date line is crossed flying through the pacific, but still, amazing.

My feline houseguest is really seeming to settle in, but I'm about to run him/her to the humane society. I wish the owners had called.. Oh well.

I wish I could announce it, but it's not at all there yet -- I'm trying to set up my website's media section, but I haven't yet gotten SpiderEyeballs, the gallery generator I like, configured. Part of it is that it wants a big XML file to configure itself, and I don't want to tweak XML every time I add a directory, so I'm going to wrap it all in Perl, with a per-directory .cfg.

Mozilla Firefox 1.5 is finally out. Go get it!

• Umm.. no, actually, that's just 1.5RC3. Oh well. Thanks, mozilla folk, for not giving me version numbers on the autoupdate.. again! argh.