Reloading
After a couple of days of reloading and getting the machine the way I want it, my last Windows machine is now my primary Linux desktop. I'm pretty happy with the results so far, although I've been pretty busy updating a few of the apps I use regularly (specifically, GAIM and Evolution). A few observations: Evolution is slow compared to performance on the laptop; I need to find out if that's just the difference in builds between the Ximian version (loaded on the laptop) and the unofficial version katzj put together at Red Hat, or if there's something significant I've done differently. Also, while I never noticed it on the laptop, memory usage of gnome-terminal is completely unacceptable; when my terminal emulator fills more resident memory than my web browser (mozilla), there's a problem. I'm temporarily back to xterm until I have a chance to look into this a little more (I may just stay here, if only for the sane cut-n-paste; what's with this shift-ctrl-c/shift-ctrl-v crap?).
New machine, new installation of Subversion and SubWiki, since I'll probably be doing development here now anyway. In the process, I've put together a few RPMs of Python 1.5.2, SWIG 1.3.16, and neon 0.23.5 for Red Hat 8.0; feel free to grab them if you find them handy (the python 1.5.2 RPMs will happily live side-by-side with python 2.2, and the SWIG RPM is built against python 2.2; you'll need another copy of SWIG installed somewhere if you want compatibility with 1.5.2).
Credit and Fraud
Just because you're paranoid, doesn't mean you won't become the victim of identity theft. I was turned down for credit recently, and I took advantage of the opportunity to get a copy of my credit report from a couple of our fine credit reporting agencies. It turns out that the reason I was turned down was a delinquent credit line that was taken out in my name, with bills being delivered to a Milwaukee, WI address. It was taken out jointly in my name and the name of a Sharon Boos (who I've googled down to an address and phone number in WI). After a little bit of phone tag, I've managed to contact the company that granted the credit, and they indicated that they had another fraud report ongoing right now involving the same woman; they were very appreciative of the address and phone number. ;-) It looks like all that I'll have to do at this point is sign an affidavit that the account was opened without my knowledge, and everything should be cleared up without much intervention on my part, but that doesn't make me any less angry about it. At this point, I have no idea if this woman was a victim of fraud as well, or if she was involved. Lesson learned: you are helpless to prevent this kind of crap, regardless of how anal you are about not providing key information to people. My faith in my fellow man just took a significant hit: what offences I used to chalk up to ignorance or stupidity, I will now very likely chalk up to malice. Bah.