Fates have conspired in my favor for once in a minor way. Meaning... I'm really really glad that I got my home Linux box working last weekend. It turned out that all week long I was working long hours, like until 2am and such. The first day I sat in my cubicle all night, leaving only for breaks and dinner, but only because I didn't realize it was going to take that long so I kept staying a little longer and a little longer. Problem is, the stuff I was working on took a long time to run each step. Luckily, the web is a good time sink but doing it at the office that late seemed like a waste. The next day I saw it coming sooner because the compute servers were clogged with jobs from others in my group and it took half an hour to even get to mine (our job server is decrepit but we don't have the balls to change it). Screw you guys, I'm going home.
Fire up the Linux laptop, turn on the TV, grab some junk food. Ah, much better. Good thing I set my VPN up. Managed to catch up on some queued up shows including a Netflix DVD that I've had for months but was never in the mood to watch; all while monitoring my jobs, making adjustments, checking for errors, and taking the necessary time out to do some actual scripting. I was really really happy I had set this laptop up the previous weekend. I didn't want to go to work the next day, just work from home in front of the boob toob.
Ok, I could have done this anyways with my Winblows computer. I do have cygwin on it afterall, and cygwin is great. But it's more of a crutch and I resist using it too much. I think it has to do with the environment. Maybe it's because I'm used to working a certain way at work with Linux that I can't do completely on Windows. Little things like mouse focus, middle button, copy/paste, etc.; just the feel that I'm used to for that setting. Well there are a couple annoyances, I never figured out how to copy/paste in and out of cygwin windows reliably. Anyhow, I don't have an exact mirror distro and setup on the Linux box (different distro and a better one at that) but most of the basic use is there. It's all familiar and at my fingertips, man pages and all.
Only bad thing is I couldn't get the X forwarding to work. Works fine on my cygwin but won't accept my display on my laptop. It wasn't that important, it was all command line and text editting and thankfully emacs can run in that mode. X was always too slow and annoying remotely anyways but it was occasionally necessary. Correction, it was fine back in grad school when I had T1 in my room (oh how I missed it). On cable internet, there's just enough lag to get turned off, especially when it's just text stuff.
It also worked out that I ended up using Ubuntu instead of Gentoo because the packages are binary and install in a jiffy whereas Gentoo would have taken hours to get set up since it compiles from source. I could see myself getting frustrated knowing I had a lot of work to do but having to wait. There's still a big desire in me to try it out but this is good enough for now.
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