He was also plugging his new book, The Great Awakening, but that was the takeaway quote. I really really hope it turns out to be true.

I am ashamed to admit that I don't watch The Daily Show every evening. I wish I could but Una and I chose not to have cable - it's expensive and we hardly ever watch TV since the internet is so much more interesting. So I heard about this from Revolution in Jesusland, an great blog by a liberal guy who writes about a great awakening among religious conservatives that will hopefully bring some fresh change to our culture and politics.

One of the banes of a web programmer's existence is dealing with user input, which can come in almost any form. You have to allow for malicious hackers who try to crash your site using strangely-formatted text, sure, but you also have to allow for users who write text in Microsoft apps like Word, which can also crash your site.

Microsoft, for their own insidious reasons, uses non-standard codes to represent things like "smart quotes", short and long dashes, etc. These codes cause errors in other programs unless they are converted, so every web programmer who hasn't sold out to The Man has to scrub user input before doing anything else with it.

Bless Leonard Richardson! He wrote a little Python class that handles this chore (and perfectly captures my feelings about this whole chore) called "AsciiDammit.py". I love it! The class also has a function called htmlDammit(), that works one HTML with "smart quotes" in it. Genius!

P.S. If you're interesting in alternatives to Word, there were a couple good articles about cool alternatives the other day.

UPDATE (2008-2-6): I just figured out that the Leonard Richardson behind ASCII, Dammit! is the same Leonard Richardson who wrote RESTful Web Services and the most excellent HTML parsing lib BeautifulSoup, His site is chock full 'o interesting stuff, like a script that turns a ReST-formatted text into presentation slides. I wanna be like Leonard when I grow up. :)

My 12in PowerBook was already pretty light compared to my old 15in Pismo PowerBook, which was much lighter than my desktop, etc. That's just one nice thing about the EeePC. Lately I've been having these little panic moments where I think I've forgotten my laptop, followed by satisfaction moments when I realize that I DO in fact have my computer with me.

Some more nice things:

The EeePC is pretty rugged. It uses a smalled LCD and the display lid is thicker than any other laptop I've seen. Even on my PowerBook, you can see little ripples in the LCD when you touch the back of the display (the side with the aluminum), but not with the EeePC. The display hinges are also really sturdy. The EeePC uses flash memory instead of a hard drive, so I don't have to worry about bumping it or setting down hard. The battery is a little loose, but the mechanism for locking it in is pretty solid so I'm not worried about that.

The EeePC is small enough that you can use it to read while standing. I've done this a couple times while waiting for the train, and I could see myself doing the same while standing if I couldn't get a seat. It wouldn't work for strap-dangling, but the Gold Line trains have places between cars where you can lean against the wall.

When I was a kid I used to read books while walking to and from school. EeePC works for that too. :)

One of the first things I did with my EeeP (right after opening up the warranty-voiding memory slot cover :) was to install Ubuntu Linux on it. I have to report that this is working out awesomely. And surprisingly for a long-time Mac fan, I have to say that I like the look of the GNOME desktop even more than OS X. It looks great on the EeePC's screen.

My eeePC came with 512MB of RAM. It used to freeze up while accessing the internal flash drive when opening apps like the Synaptic Package Manager - I think it was reading/writing to swap. I ordered a 2GB RAM card which was finally delivered last night, and the EeePC seems more stable, though time will tell. Now when I load Synaptic the drive access light blinks a couple times but that's all. We'll have to see how it acts after a couple hours of use.

There are a few things I'd change if I change if I could: The biggest thing is the power adapter - I'm afraid I'm gonna lose it someday so it'd be better if it was something more standard. I also wish the battery lasts longer. At least the adapter is small and the cable is pretty long. The most awesome hack would be if the USB ports could accept power as well as send, so you could charge it from your desktop.

Another thing that I don't like is that I have to unmount the SD card whenever I suspend. I suspect this is something that can be resolved - there's probably a way to make the OS unmount the SD card automatically on suspend, but I haven't found that yet. I've gotten around it by changing the power settings. Most of the time, when I close the lid I just want to move around a bit. I've changed it so that when I close the lid while on battery power it just dims the screen instead of suspending.

The EeePC runs pretty hot, which stands to reason since it has a 900MHz processor and is running the same software as my computer at work. After it's been on for awhile you feel the heat pouring out of the vents. You want to be really careful not to block the air vents so you don't fry the electronics inside. But this is just something I just keep in mind and it hasn't been a problem - so far.

Overall though, the EeePC is an amazing little device. A couple days ago somebody told me that it looked like something they'd expect a spy to use. Getting a laptop really changed how I thought about computing, and this changes it even more.