Linux Hippies Get Instant Internet & Scry is Scared of Socials
I'm behind on my news, so I don't know when Asus brought out the P5E3 Deluxe/WiFi-AP@n, although much of the information I found on it was dated roughly around the 8th of October.  This particular mobo is currently listing for $360, which means that it about 4x more than I am interested in paying.  And it is an Intel board with DDR3 memory... both of which I am irrationally resistant too.

But it has an interesting feature that Asus is calling "Express Gate".  This is their branding of Splashtop, an embedded Linux distro.  Basically, you get the ability to "pre"boot into Express Gate where you can get into a custom version of Firefox or a version of Skype.

Now, this is not quite as cool as when I first heard about it... when I thought I was hearing about a FULL linux distro that was embedded on the motherboard.  That would have very sweet.  This is just nifty.

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Veronica Belmont, late of Buzz Out Loud and soon of Mahalo Daily, popped out a new website a few days ago.  http://swordandlaser.com/ is apparently a new social network... erm, a new book club.  The first book up, "The Golden Compass." 

Except, I'm confused.  To quote from S&L: "Hopefully we can all acquire the book by next Wednesday, and then we can plan on talking about the first chapter! The next book will be decided by a vote, and it’ll probably be a “classic” of some kind. Enjoy!"

I can read this two ways.  One says that Veronica intends the book club to read the first chapter of classic SciFantasy books for the next few months (years?) and the other says that the first two sentences have no relationship to each other and should not be squished together into one paragraph.

The whole thing makes me nervous though.  I spent a whole ten minutes crawling around the "social" side of S&L and found myself really really wanting to get involved with these other scifantasy fangeeks who seem to take it all way too seriously... just like me.  It looked like a group of people where I might actually fit in.  And have fun. 

And that scares me a bit.