First off, let me appologize to all who were hoping for a day-by-day account like I usually do when traveling – I had every intention of doing one – but there were certain practical limitations to this – most notably that I simply spent every free moment exploring (and giving Silvia a milion much overdo hugs) and pretty much never turned on a computer when I could have. Either way – let me tell you then about what I found San Francisco to be like. In a word: amazing. The US's last vestige of liberalism is obsessed with living out the true meaning of 'land of the free' to whatever extent it can. Some of the things behind this can be easilly verified – San Francisco has the most democratic legal system anywhere in the world. They actually have refferendums to vote on very nearly every single passed in the city. Mix that in with the most culturally diverse city in the USA – and you have a recipe for a generous, accepting and yes fun society.From walking through castro and seeing – for the first time in my life – a world where Gay people can just be themselves without any need for pretense or hiding (something South Africa sadly has in name only) to the leafy shades of berkely where everyone you meet seems to be a civil-libertarian protester who never left. As is my style, I didn't do the usual 'touristy' stuff much, though I did visit the Fisherman's wharf and I bought a lot of Girhardeli chocolate. I also used the opportunity of being in the states to buy myself a new laptop – specifically this one (http://www.gateway.com/home/products/ret/ret_mx6920.shtml) . Which I would highly recomend, it's by far the most power you can buy for the price right now. OpenLab 4.Z Beta does not yet have drivers for the wifi card included, but intel has made drivers available so they can be installed, and will be in the default system for stable. Still having the common issue of being unable to get sound on the (otherwize detected) hda_intel card as well, but this too should be fixable. Otherwize however, it works briliantly. Super-fast, massive battery-life, lovely widescreen monitor… in short it's schaweet. For the first time in many years, I decided to keep a dualboot on this baby not because I have the slightest desire to actually work with windows and besides – I get lost because everything is just so clunkilly put together. Frankly, anybody who still claims windows is easier to use is spouting FUD. There are at least as many work-arounds and odd corners as in any modern linux distro – they are just in different places, and of course they tend to be better known to users by now. The reason I did want to keep a dual-boot is simply that I am doing ever-more multiplatform software, having the ability to test the windows versions on a native install which I am highly familiar with is a requirement, rather than spending a fortune on upgrading the crash-and-burn-box copy (which I think got wiped recently anyway) I reckoned it would be much smarter to just use the license I got with this laptop anyway.Of course, like most laptops, the windows-install disk included cannot manually partition so dualbooting could have been tricky – luckilly there is a lovely way around it. Gparted's ntfs resize capability. Due to an oversight earlier, openlab (http://www.getopenlab.com) 4.Z beta does not yet have the support built in by default – the gparted build does but the backend tools aren't included. So I built a package, stuck it on a memory stick, booted the livecd, installed the package, and resized the partition to be a very tiny piece of the disk indeed – just enough for it's purpose, crash-and-burn testing of windows apps – then installed normally. It was amazingly easy. Only note here is that I must make sure to include the ntfsprogs package in the stable build. So that was basically it, I loved San Francisco. It was an unforgettable experience for sure, but the very best bit – was having Silvia there with me. That turned a wonderful week, into an amazing one.
