The apt + rpm article surely produced a lot of noise, and some interesting ideas were presented in the follow-ups. Now it's up to the buildmasters, packaging tool maintainers and packaging people to discuss what can be done in the technical lists.

The local power company did it again, this time trashing my /home filesystem. Now that the tragedy already happened I'm ordering an UPS (but isn't it what usually happens anyway?). The LVs, however, emerged intact. Oh well. There was so much junk there, I think I was needing a clean-up anyway ;(

Bought a Zip 250 IDE, ten disks and two 10/100 network cards for US$100. Now I'll be able to backup my data.