I’ve come to realize that if I’m running through Liferea reading blogs, I basically don’t read past the first line of any paragraphs that are more than five lines. A cost of the shortening attention spans and lack of time in this world, I suspect.

If your style sucks, people won’t even get as far as discovering whether there’s something to be found in your content. This is pretty similar to writing newspaper articles, where you’re taught to use an 8th-grade vocabulary and keep your paragraphs to a minimal length.

To blog writers: Don’t use long paragraphs. If you’re lucky, people will get as far as finishing the first sentence. There’s another lesson to learn there: make sure each paragraph’s first sentence is truly the most important thing in that ‘graph.

To people who write blogs as one big paragraph with no line spaces: I don’t read your blogs.

To people writing blogs in broken English: Work on your skills, or people won’t read your posts because it’s too much effort.

I sent shopblt.com an e-mail at 12:40 p.m. By 12:46, I had a reply from their sales manager. By 12:54, I had a PSU being shipped out today. I’ll have to forgive them for how things originally went, because they certainly made up for it.

Now that’s what I call grease.

Remember how I ordered my PSU from the one place that had 4 in stock? Well, I just got an e-mail this morning telling me it’s actually on order and they won’t get it until 9/19. So much for getting up and running again quickly.

I’m not impressed by their “real-time stock” listing being wrong and deceptive. Incidentally, the place is shopblt.com. I sent them an e-mail letting them know what I think of this.

I was attempting to get my “new” old laptop to a usable point. It’s a P3-500 with 64MB of PC100 RAM and a 6GB hard drive.

Although the specs say 256MB is the memory max, I got it up to 384 (It couldn’t handle 512). When attempting to upgrade the hard drive to a 20GB spare I had around, however, I managed to somehow rip the 1.5″ IDE cable.

The problem wasn’t apparent until I was unable to format the new disk, and when regressing to the old disk, the same problems happened. But it took a disk utility I found at the IBM/Hitachi site to tell me that the cable was the problem, and I wasn’t just somehow destroying disks.

Unfortunately, a replacement for this 1.5″ cable runs $25 at the cheapest parts site I could find, and up to $50 at others. Tack on $10 shipping and that’s a fairly expensive mistake.

Oh well. Guess I should sleep more before next time I attempt computer maintenance.

Fortunately Gentoo’s brand-new X-enabled LiveCD saved the day. I was able to work without a functional hard drive by using that and ssh-ing to the Pegasos, my temporary workstation.