Best laid plans

I was gearing up to write up a summary of the trials and tribulations of getting openSuSE and Backtrack Linux up and running on a new Thinkpad x201 series laptop (it has been quite an effort so far), particularly focusing on Linux/vendor hardware support issues and the effect of Lenovo's practice of adding a pciid whitelist check to their BIOS to prevent owners from using hardware from non-Lenovo sources.

Unfortunately, despite the promising start in acquiring the (hopefully) final part necessary to fix the most egregious issue (wifi), UPS has managed to derail this in a spectacular manner ("Well you can't blame us for not delivering the package marked "URGENT!, Rush Delivery, Overnight AM delivery" because we declared an emergency nine and a half hours after it was supposed to have arrived. We'll probably try to deliver it Monday. Probably. No I don't understand why that might be a problem or why you are unhappy about us claiming that we would deliver it tonight hours after we had pulled all of our trucks off the road due to a 16th of an inch snowfall.")

Hopefully the part will arrive in sufficient time that I can actually work on it in the copious free time I have during my week-long certification boot camp. Untill then, fuck UPS.

Wikileaks followup for today's 2600 meeting

As a heads up to all of the 2600 meeting attendees who read this, today I will have about two dozen DVDs with some Wikileaks related content much of which is difficult (and, depending on how you go about it, expensive) to track down and acquire. Quantities will be limited to that for now (don't have the cash for more blanks) and it will be first come first served (although at 2GiB a decent size flash drive and a few minutes with a laptop at the meeting can get you the content in case I run out of discs). I'll leave the exact contents a 'secret' until you pick on up but I will assure everyone that it's all been checked for anything malicious.