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The baby was sick with a virus. Our doctor couldn’t recall how many kids had been in last week with diarrhea and vomiting. Our kid too. It’s awful not being able to do anything but wait for it to run its course. At least I saw how good his disposition really is- he would play, cramp and groan, cry for a few seconds until it passed and then resume playing like nothing had happened.

I’ve been exploring window managers and it isn’t the navel-gazing activity that it might seem. A coworker turned me on to Ratpoison, a keyboard-driven tiling manager, think of it as the equivalent of screen for X-windows. I like the automagic management and the tiling but I prefer tabs and need to run the occasional mouse-driven windowing app (firefox, etc.).

Ion3 is more my style. It’s small, fast, keyboard-driven with mouse support, tiling and tabbing, and relatively unobtrusive. It also supports traditional “floating” windows. It uses Lua as an extension language which adds to its appeal, I’ve meant to look at Lua for some time.

Ion gives me almost exactly what I want- keyboard control, several workspaces tiled and tabbed, one or two workspaces in the normal way, and in all light on system resources. I have some issues to solve or work around- mostly that Firefox is ill-behaved and generally broken but Opera and Konqueror work.

New plan. We’re looking for real estate again, this time away from the New York metropolitan area.

Damn. The Visor met its end. No external damage, just dead. It was safe in its softcase, inside my laptop bag but its dead none the less.

Bought another off ebay but I’m thinking I should buy two or three more as spares.