i should be working (but i'm fixing my computer).

Soooo ...

My actual job morphed from nothing much to do into chained-to-desk 24/7 (except when driving like madman to next location).  Yikes!  No time to blog -- but lots of things to comment on.

...

1. I discovered by accident that the updater applet is finally working (for me, anyway) as it never used to, but I was installing OpSu into a Windows VirtualBox and so I had not yet disabled the updater applet.  It notified me of security updates and --amazing-- actually ran and installed them instead of crashing as had always been my experience in the past.  Now it just ran on another computer.  Good deal!
2. I have put lots of Windows XP into VirtualBox on OpSu Linux.  For the first time I installed OpSu Linux into a VirtualBox on Windows XP.  Unfortunately, it inherited the general clunkiness of Windows -- slow and less elegant, doesn't interface with my peripherals very well.  Not quite what I was hoping for.  But, it does work in Seamless Mode and the "network folders" to the host work, so if/when I come up with something I need my Linux programs for, they will be there. (OTOH, right now my network folders to the host have root permissions, so that's inconvenient.) I look forward to the day you can carry a VB software appliance on a flash drive (presumably in your smartphone or whatever, and mount it wherever you are.  Or download one from your internet storage location.
3. In the latter vein, I have been wanting to build a "Live flash drive" OpSu install that was pre-set with all of my [MANY] customizations.  That way, any computer that I have permission to power down and restart instantly could be identical to the one I use regularly -- with the added benefit that when I turn it off, there are no inadvertent traces of my activity left behind.  (We'll make this one read-only).  I have the rudiments of this system already -- with the exception that it is a stock OpSu 11.2.  Not good enough.  Can't, eg., setup the desktop and Firefox every time I start a computer! Sooo..., let's move on to the next item.
4. Went to SCALE again this year in Los Angeles, 9x for them (not for me) and it was a big super-duper success.  Plus, unlike last year, there were actual women involved (yes guys, your domain is being invaded by the smarter sex ...)  But in any event, the high point for me was attending a late-Sunday seminar -- why does everyone leave by Sunday afternoon -- on how to use OpSu Studio.  Which, by the way, is precisely the tool I need to build my own personal Live flash drive / CD version of OpSu.  Way Cool (and now if I only had time to utilize it ...)  Plus I got a Novell Penguin plush toy and a Novell pocket power outlet just for playing.  I also learned that I do not say OpenSUSE correctly, apparently -- my KDE booth was directly across from OpenSUSE, and I discovered that at least their designated participants call it OpenSousa and not OpenSuzie.
5. Well, I was a rather hypocritical KDE presenter, but Aaron had to leave for awhile on Sunday and so I covered a large segment of the Sunday crowd.  Yes, KDE, I said really good things about your team and software, I even demo'd it and showed people how to do things they did not know how to do (eg., "how do I get rid of the cashew?")  For awhile, I was the only one who had a 4.6 version running, in fact.  But, but ... well, ok there may have been a few instances when I confessed that I don't actually run KDE plasma as my primary desktop!  I was quick to point out that KDE is a "software collection" and that I run A LOT of KDE software, couldn't function without it.  But that, well, I also had GNOME (fancier booth down the row, which is amusing, because KDE Plasma is fancier than GNOME desktop).  People loved the Netbook interface and the multiple Activities -- which I also consider to be Very Good Features of the Plasma interface.  The problem is that once I load it down with the tools I want, well, it crashes.
6. My netbook has an ATI Radeon, so I got to commiserate with an flgrx driver programmer over the annoying state of affairs at ATI.  Of course, I have an annoying state of affairs with NVIDIA, since I happen to have the one display they have left out of their legacy driver.
7. I did not see Jolicloud.  If they had reps. there at SCALE, I did not see them.  Too bad.
8. I stopped by the Haiku table to say hi again this year.  There demo sure looks nice.  They agreed that the Alpha2 has install issues (I told them I had to use a nightly build to get my test machine running.)  And, I discussed the issues with the package manager situation; and the difficulty surrounding ports of Linux programs -- if you port stuff, you inherit dependency issues, which Haiku wants to avoid.  If you don't port stuff, you lack functionality.  Great guys, I look forward to progress.
9. I was surprised at the serious commitment from Novell in promoting OpSu.  Cool!
10. So ... as a KDE presenter I had to field questions about the Nokia - Microsoft tie-up.  What???  Good thing the internet was working.  Specifically, what happens to KDE, since Nokia owns QT, KDE is written in QT and Nokia has abandoned the free world to put their future in the hands of clunkyware from Microsoft.  No idea, but just as LibreOffice forked from OpenOffice upon the Oracle takeover, we suppose the QT can fork if necessary. Or whatever.
11. This was (well would have been if I realized it at the time) embarrassing.  People asked me whether KDE can run on the compiz windows manager and I said, "well ... yes, but not necessary as KWIN is a very mature 3d/effects windows manager itself and doesn't require Compiz."  Right answer, but when I got home from SCALE, I was looking at my KDE Plasma desktop and noticed something interesting.  It seemed to have an Emerald Theme.  This was when I remembered that my KDE netbook desktop was actually running on Compiz because I had some difficulties with KWIN relating to the aforementioned ATI video conundrum.  OOPS!
12. Some visitors were impressed with my Conky bar at the top of the screen -- were surprised that conky would run in Plasma.  Yep.  Even told them the story of how I started running conky -- that KDE 3.5 had some nice unobtrusive panel applets for internals like temp and the like, but KDE 4 team had not ported similar tools.
13. My latest personal desktop is a new hybrid (remember the days when I was posting about icekdeomows?  No, probably not.)  LXDE, running on ICEwm, instead of OpenBox with the Infadel theme, Conky bar at the top, ICEwm panel at the top (autohide) LXDE panels at bottom and both sides for small launching icons of everything like to do. I was running Compiz, which looked nice, but I can't track down the Emerald Theme any more and fusion-icon seems to have been abandoned.  I like fusion-icon because it allows a quick switch of the windows manager when the effects start getting in the way.  I've set up a hot key to run krunner; and of course, I still run a host of KDE software, starting with dolphin.  Then I've got my panels sync'd from one computer to another via dropbox.  Which works waaay cool, except for the time my bottom panel was overwritten by a 0 kb (empty) file for some reason unknown to man.  But fortunately, dropbox has roll-back options, so it wasn't too difficult to save.
14. My daughter discovered that she could improve the playback of Netflix on clunkyware (oops, did I mean Windows Vista?) by killing the explorer interface.  I would not have thought of that -- and it seems to me usually explorer auto-restarts itself.  However, she said when she killed it with taskmanager, it stayed gone and Netflix kept running -- in a much improved fashion.  When she was done -- and wanted to get back to her KDE desktop -- she ran taskmanager again for the shutdown option.  SMART KID! -- Hey, I wonder if this will work in my VirtualBox install?  I can run Netflix, but it's a crappy older computer and it doesn't run all that wonderfully.  Plus, as blogged here in the anals of crappy hardware/software combinations, his is a computer that will not actually boot in Windows, as somewhere around the three-year mark, Microsoft interjected some code into the drivers that is not compatible with the NVIDIA graphics card.  I wonder how many HP zd7000s ended up in the landfill as the result of this small MS subterfuge?  (If you've still got one, send it to me, I will put linux on it and use it for another 10 years.)
15. I learned at SCALE that if I add the pearl development repository, maybe I won't have any trouble finding the dependencies for gscan2pdf.  I will try.  One can hope.