Things you need:

• XO laptop!
• >= 2GB SD Card (I used a 16 GB card from Transcend – no issues.)
• >= 300MB USB stick
• a bittorrent client

1. Get a Developer Key – this takes at least a day (for no apparent reason) so do it first.
2. Get the Sugar install totally up to date. Including the applications. I tried to not do the apps first time around and I suspect this is why I was having some necessary unix commands not found. This totally doesn’t work if sfdisk is hiding.  If you accidentally close the “update apps” bar on startup, it’s in the new Sugar control panel (one of the options under your center icon.)
3. Follow the directions. (This includes downloading a torrent of the starter ubuntu files.) If things go pear shaped in the middle, rebooting and starting over seemed to work ok for me. I got as far as “Make the partition table” and had to start over because the silly thing wouldn’t unmount the SD card. It was scary, but it did work out ok.

The directions on the forum are really good. I think the only thing that killed me was the lack of explanation that you really need to update Sugar first. (They hint that part of this is getting the SD support up to date, which seems pretty important.)
 

Presents and food and hanging out together all day. Perfect!

Then my tummy tried to kill me for a day. Evil tummy. Evil tummy kept me from the Christmas ham. Evil.

Uhm. But I ran simulations for research and only got a tiny bit behind on my study schedule.

So yeah, school’s been out for a week. I did NOTHING last weekend, and it was very nice.
Ok, I did find a thumbprint cookie recipe that I’m very happy with (still using that Solo raspberry filling for everything! Did not roll in nuts) They come out like a nice soft shortbread, and the filling jazzes them up a bit. Weird internet tip – use a (closed) chapstick to create the dents.

I should be working on flowcharts to send my advisor (first round of results with known algorithms not performing as well as expected) flowcharts are not nearly as fast to make as she had implied and I had hoped.

I’ve also started studying for my comps, which while kind of overwhelmingly big, is the same kind of structured studying I’ve been doing for the last few years for prelims, so at least I know the drill.

We have a tree, we have stockings, I made gingerbread and the above mentioned thumbprints, and even found holiday stations on Pandora to listen to while wrapping presents. Christmas is not stressing me out too much for a change.

Does anyone have any traditional Christmas baking ideas?

1. Add one tiny section to my Cont. Modeling writeup
2. Revise/Edit my econ paper (Revise is so much easier than write, isn’t it?)
3. Do .. stuff for my research so I have something to say when I talk to KK next week

Somehow, it feels like not that much.

My econ pres was yesterday, and I’m so glad it’s over and I didn’t have an extra weekend to fret about it.

I seem to be pretty non-sick during the day, but as soon as I lay down, the evil snot invades the sinuses. Nyquil keeps it at bay, but only for ~ 4 hour blocks, so I have to get up at 3 am and take more Nyquil.
I’ve now missed 2 full weeks of judo.

Yesterday was our first real snow, and therefore the first snow shoveling. I survived that, so I guess I’m not doing so bad.

I just wanted to cheer about having completed the first draft of my econ paper.