I added a gadget that will hopefully help me track the things I want to get done with Ubuntu. I've started saying 'Ubuntu' instead of 'Linux' all the time because I spend 99% of my time using Ubuntu. I periodically tinker with other distros, but mostly I'm settled into Ubuntu and its various options.

My biggest concern is the wireless card. I have a few options on this task which I haven't completely exhausted yet. Mostly I'm consulting what people have already written on Ubuntu Forums and applying that information to my situation. No luck yet though. As it stands I'm mildly disinclined to fuss too much over the network card because my schedule has me in a room with easy access to wired internet when I'm doing my work. And at other times I've been booting into Windows Vista and running Ubuntu via VirtualBox. I'll get that wireless card sorted eventually. Or I'll take the computer to the computer help guys' store in town. Or I'll get a new wireless card.

I'd love to be able to customise Conky to my heart's content, but I don't understand it as well as I'd like to. I've run into problems trying to set up weather forecast information with it, and all I really want is a nice date/time script (which I now have) and a weather script, which is being evil. I'll work that out eventually.

And once I get Kurdnatta's Ubuntu straightened out (probably meaning a reinstall, blah), I'll focus on setting up XSane so I can run the printer's scanning functions from there and converting him to an entirely Ubuntu machine. Maybe. There are some games I still run on the Windows 98 OS, though I have other options for those, I think.

Well, actually it's not much of a saga, because it's over. I fixed the printer tonight. I opened it up to see why that paper was jammed in there and I discovered the problem.

The good news: I removed the blockage.

The bad news: The blockage was three CDs.

Naturally the top CD, the one which now sports a pair of gouges in its surface from having been dragged and dug into by the printer's drive wheels (I don't know if they're called that, but you know what I mean), was the store-bought music disc. The other two were an Xubuntu disc that had started spouting data read errors and an unknown (probably a weirdly-functioning GPartEd) disc. Ninety-nine percent certain I had ripped the music CD.

Why were there CDs in my printer, you ask? I remember having set those discs in the printer tray because I didn't want to forget about them. I don't remember starting a print job with the discs still in the tray, though the last time I tried to print I was in a bit of a hurry and may not have noticed the discs having perhaps slid deeper into the paper tray.

The moral of the story is: don't put CDs in your printer tray. At least the printer still prints.