I like to take a gander at the comments Akismet tags as spam before deleting them every now and again. Today I came across this doozy. It was soooo long I broke it into two giant files rather than one.

After becoming infected with the Harry Potter excitement contagion I decided to wait in line with a friend of mine last night even though I ordered my book online to be delivered on Saturday (he was leaving for vacation at 4am the next day and wanted to have it to take with him). I don’t know what it is about being in a store full of hyped up, costumed fans but whatever it was I had to be a part of it. Under the assumption that the blue wristband we had meant something, we headed back up to the store at 11:00 PM. The line outside was long and it appeared that the store was still open as people were in the cafe and wandering around the book isles. Turns out they were having to keep track of how many people were inside the store and could only let more in when some came out because of occupancy limits and fire code.

It was a little before this time that I discovered I wouldn’t be able to be a part of the Twitter stream as I had previously thought. My SMS to web and web to SMS wasn’t working. “Perhaps the gateway is down,” was the response from T-Mobile customer service. SMS to and from other phones worked fine. Thank goodness for the mobile Twitter page although I couldn’t keep up with tweets very well through that.

After hanging out in line for a while we learned that the wristband didn’t really mean anything but the color of our flier determined when we would get in. Everyone that did not preorder had a white flier and would be going last regardless of when they picked it up. My extra trip to Barnes and Noble earlier that afternoon to get a wristband and flier meant nothing in our placement as people just now arriving were getting the same thing. The people with red fliers were the first in and they were the ones that preordered and picked up their fliers very early in the day. Next up were the yellow fliers (also preorders) then blue fliers; the preorders that didn’t appear till the line had formed. Our white flier guaranteed us last.

Barnes and Noble staff did a good job separating the reds and yellows and getting them into the store in a timely manner. The ugliness didn’t start until they decided the one long line of blues and whites should be reshuffled. Basically they told everyone near the front of the line with a white paper to move to the back of the line. The people with white papers in the middle then got to be in the front of the white paper line. This was really aggravating because we had been there standing for much longer than some.

Then the line cutting started. I guess I am a little naive because I was disappointed to find that the majority of folks cheating in line were the older folks with the white hair and the suburban housewife looking folks. I had an older lady yell at me that she had been there for 2 hours (compared to my 5) and how dare I cut in line (he had been making her way with her husband through the line one group a a time for a while). After I asked her how long she had been there and retorted with my time she demanded that I prove I had an “exclusive while paper and blue wristband”. Understand, there was a table with white papers and wristbands about 10 feet from us that they were still handing out to late arrivals. Eventually I lost the will to hold my spot in line and just let her pass. Sometimes it just isn’t worth it.

I want to add that there were more cool people than mean ones. I had some lovely chats with fellow line waiters about the movies and the books. Over all it was a lot of fun to be part of a community like that for a little bit. This is the first time I have ever stood in line for anything.

Once inside the store the line moved crazy fast and it didn’t take long to get to the counter. My friend purchased two copies of the book and a set of audio CDs. They had plenty in the stock so there was no limit to the amount you wanted to purchase. I resisted buying one on the spot since I had already ordered one.
So, here I sit seeing tweets from people that are done reading and wishing I had bought a copy after all that line waiting because mine still hasn’t been delivered. Apparently I am not alone as there are also quite a few tweets from people wondering where their order is.

NOTE: At a little after 1:00 AM CDT my SMS to and from web miraculously came back to life and it appears all my crazy Tweets went through along with my SMS “test” messages. Even though T-Mobile doesn’t typically queue undeliverable SMS messages, the appeared to have done so last night. Sorry to those that got a storm of messages from me. The conspiracy theorist inside me wonders if the gateway was “down” to avoid issues with the spoilers and lawsuits. The technologist in me wants to think that so many people were Twittering or using other SMS type services last night that the gateways just couldn’t handle it. I think the latter theory is cooler. =)

This has absolutely NOTHING to do with technology other than I found it while looking for a birthday gift for my son who turns 13 in less than a week. I can totally see how this would be beneficial to hikers and such but I know that people with fanny packs typically let them hang down quite a bit, and the weight of a pack of water should really weigh it down…. which led to the visual image of someone walking around with a straw in their mouth coming from their groin area. Stupid mental auto play, I am now completely disturbed.

Ubuntu Studio Splash Screen

Originally uploaded by linuxchic.

Sorry, just getting around to blogging this. You can get the same packages in a rollup in the ubuntu universe through apt under the names: ubuntustudio-audio, ubuntustudio-audioplugins, ubuntustudio-graphics, ubuntustudio-video

Ubuntu Universe info on ubuntustudio-meta

The damage has been done and the debut episode for the Alternageek.coml podcast has been posted. =) Listen to Linuxchic (that’s me ;)), the CodeNinja, and TechMonkey babble on and on about technology related stuff then call or email us and tell us what you think.

Receive updates through Twitter about new posts at Linuxchic.net. Go to http://twitter.com/LinuxchicNet and add as a friend!

Part three in a series about things I love. 

I love my commute. There is an occassion a few times a month when I wish I could get home faster but overall I like my drive to and from work. It takes me an average of 30 minutes to get in every morning and about 45 minutes to get home every night if there are no accidents to slow me down. I use the time to listen to podcasts and to make mental lists. I use the time to make plans about my websites and blogs. It is my “ramp up to work” time and “wind down” from work time.

I gripe a lot at discourteous annoying drivers, crazy out of control drivers and slow people who make my commute last longer than it should. I dump all my stress and aggressions out through those expletive filled outbursts within the safety of my car and arrive to my destination ready for what lies ahead.

For the last three years I had lived in a rural area and had a five minute commute to pretty much anywhere in town. I hated it. I love the city with it’s congested roads and interstates and how it forces me to spend time alone in my car. I love my daily commute. I hope I never have to carpool, I would hate to lose my “me time”.

Sorry it has been a few weeks since I started this series. I have been synchronizing my posts between Vox and Linuxchic.net and I think I need to separate them again. Linuxchic.net will go back to being mostly techie, with the exception of a few posts series such as this one and Vox will be for mostly other types of posts. I am also going to stop the Twitter updates from my blog because frankly, I don’t think it follows Twitter etiquette  to tell the whole world every time I link to a story I like.  If you want to follow me on Twitter and read where I am, what I am eating, and other random things I might be doing, visit my Twitter page and add me. I also feed my Twitter updates to Jaiku.