Lake Ray Hubbard is a large lake just outside of Dallas, right off the interstate. My young friend and I walked in Elgin B. Robertson park, which is made of open spaces abutting the lake. The cry of red-winged blackbird pierced the air like a metallic alarm clock. The ring-billed gulls hovered in mid-air. We walked along the shore, enjoying the terrain.
We went to Bass Pro Shop and looked at its curious but interesting wares. We visited the CD collection at Best Buy, which has lots of metal albums that my friend enjoyed. We went to a Chinese buffet for lunch, where I had a Mongolian BBQ.
After lunch, we went to the Firewheel Coffee Shop in Garland. We planned to do a new install on my friend's computer. I had originally installed Pear Linux, a GNOME remix of Ubuntu whose appearance is a modestly distant cousin to Apple desktops. Pear proved attractive but a bit too taxing for the 1.3b Ghz Celeron M CPU. It was fine, but a bit slow. I had a DVD with me with Lubuntu on it. I figured the lightweight linux desktop environment (LXDE) would
be much more zippy.
Before we just replaced Pear with Lubuntu, I suggested that my friend try to simply download
LXDE. Sure enough, it was in Pear's repository. Soon we had re-customized the Gnome desktop into an LXDE desktop. It made an immediate difference in performance. My friend began customizing the experience to make it even less Pear-like. We ended up with a kind of Pear Linux 5 LXDE that kept Pear's nice app store while cutting out the cumbersome Gnome desktop
We got the basic change done in 40 minutes, as painless as painless can be.
We tried to go to the mystery/suspense bookstore in Wylie, but it was gone. Nothing else in Wylie held our interest, as we had already eaten. We went to Collins Park. Though the weather was over 80, the wind was brisk. We tried to see about renting a boat, but the rental place was closed.
I dropped off my friend, and then went for a walk in Sister Grove Park. As I walked, a huge black labrador came around a corner from behind cedar trees. She was frightened when she saw me.I suppose bespectacled men with (tourist) NASA baseball caps are not her usual woodland experience. I took a picture of a small pond, which I post above.
I wandered a bit on country roads, and then was guided home via a computer map.
I lost a postal chess game today when I dropped a queen to a not-very-elaborate trap.