today i went to somebody’s house in kent to drop off some coaxial cable, then i went to firwood, a suburb to the south of tacoma, to get parrot food, then i went through puyallup to milton, where i picked up an order for busines cards from a client, then i went into federal way to go to costco for groceries and gas before completing the grand circut home. once home, i prepared the artwork for the business card, and placed the order at the printers, did the laundry, and took out the trash.

i’ve got to take photos, and paste up a new page of printing examples for the Hybrid Elephant web site. i’ve got to figure out how to make, and then implement an updateable calendar for the BSSB web site.

i’ve mentioned my aged, brain-injured client in the past. this time he had me come over because, he admitted when i got there, he “got mad” at his computer, recently, and started randomly right- and left-clicking his mouse in an attempt to get it to do something (he never did tell me exactly what). the big result, which i’m still not exactly sure how he pulled it off, was that instead of kubuntu 9.whatever that i had installed for him, he now has a fresh, clean installation of kubuntu 10.04… and a whole bunch of “panels”, which are the linux equivalent of what, on windows, is called the “task bar”, and of which you can make as many as you want, that all do different things if you’re so inclined.

my client knows nothing about how all of the panels got there, he said that he was trying to get a popup window to go away. he did have “knotes” running, which makes popup “sticky notes” on the screen, and he had several dozen notes containing nothing but a date, that were all minimised.

i was a little taken aback that he had apparently successfully upgraded the system, but if nothing else, it’s a testament to how easy linux is to upgrade. once i got him back to a reasonable number (which, in his case, is one) of panels, deleted and removed the “popup” notes, and the KDE “desktop sharing” application, which had apparently been installed with the upgrade, and had him up and running again in about 20 minutes. i didn’t actually lock the panel – which would prevent him from “getting mad at the computer” and randomly changing things, and which i could have done fairly easily – because i don’t want to limit his exploration of the computer. if he’s aware of the fact that “getting mad” at the computer doesn’t automatically ruin the computer, my guess is that he’ll be a lot more willing to “poke around” the computer without getting mad…