I’m still pricing wireless hookups at local electronics stores, but to be honest, they seem a little expensive to what I’m used to. Granted, most of them seem to be bundled kits and come with a PCMCIA wireless card, so a ~$90 isn’t terrible. I guess I’m just used to prices that fall in the $50 range.

The benefit in a wireless connection for me is the flexibility and loss of a few wires on my desktop, which, as you can imagine, is getting a little gnarled. The added bonus is that two neighbors who are co-workers would be able to use it too, and we could all contribute to the monthly cost (which is quite small, from my perspective, but considerable for them).

In the meantime I’ve been considering getting a projector screen system, after watching a friend’s for a while. It’s definitely in the “want” and not “need” category, but when the “need” category gets shallow, things in the “want” category start to look like “needs.” Such is life.

On the one good news side I managed to get SCIM working to a reasonable degree for my Ubuntu newcomers. It’s not exactly perfect yet, but it’s working to an acceptable level. The difference between SCIM’s behavior and the behavior my friend wants is very slim — SCIM only converts between the romaji letterset and the hiragana/katakana alphabets when told to do so, by pressing the space bar. My friend is used to a system where letter pairs are instantaneously converted without being told. So that added keypress is a bit of a hassle.

It may sound like small bananas to you, and to me it does too. But it’s little things like that that turn people off. And imagine: If you had to hit the space bar between each letter you typed, you’d get tired of it real quick. So I am making this priority number one right now, and as soon as I have a few hours to spare I’m going to iron out this issue and close the door on it.

My fingers are crossed, as Americans say.