Revisiting Pine and switching to Arch Linux

I just recently installed Pine again. I was searching for a nice console mail program for a while now.
I tried mutt and gnus for a while. Neither of those could really please me. Stupid little default things I can't get my head around, like mutt and not being able to use the arrow keys when viewing a mail. Well you can use them, but they don't do what I'd expect them to do (ie. scrolling down). I've googled a bit for rebinding mutt keys, but it's too much hassle. I just want it to work properly. I've installed pine again and it's much much more intuitive. For me atleast.
And setting up my gmail was ridiculously easy. I found a good link here: http://www.ii.com/internet/messaging/pine/pc/#gmailIMAP. Just followed their instructions and gmail was up and running in seconds.
I really like pine, it does the job very well.

Recently I've been changing opinions about my PC usage. Stuff just has to work. I don't feel like configuring programs for hours anymore. I used to love that kind of things.
I've switched Linux distros aswell. I'm all for configurability and want to be in control of my OS so I used Gentoo for about 5 or 6 years, can't remember exactly. But tinkering with config files, having to recompile my kernel every time it updates, waiting for stuff to compile every time I want to install something just to see what it is... Syncing the portage tree takes quite a while...
So I've decided to give Arch Linux a go. So far so good, I've been using it for a couple of weeks now and I must say, I'm really loving it. It's fast, easy to work with and it gives me the power to customize everything I want. Also, the precompiled and optimized i686 kernel enables all my hardware of my laptop to just work.
It's probably my own lack of skill that I couldn't get some small things to work with my Gentoo kernel, but now it saves me the hassle of having to go verify every damn kernel option I need every time there's a kernel update. (I've had mishaps with make oldconfig.)
Ofcourse there are like a bazillion kernel modules loaded when I boot now, I'll probably have to tweak that a little because I surely don't need all of them. Still, performance didn't go down. (if it did, I'm not noticing)
Giving users the power (obligation?) to optimize can result in badly optimized and slower systems. I believe the Arch Linux folks did a great job of optimizing their default kernel. I'm going to stick with it for a while.

Lisp for the web

It's been quite a while since I blogged here.
I've started using Hunchentoot for a little reporting site I needed at work.
Since my boss doesn't tell me how things need to be written or in what language, I have the freedom of choosing my own tools:

Hunchentoot + clwho + clsql

I have to say, it's quite the combination. Easy to write in, readable code and just plain fun to do.
I've always used PHP for web based things. That's in the past now. Ofcourse it'll be harder to find a web hosting company who will install hunchentoot for me, if I'd ever want to use it for a site of my own. For now, that's not the issue, since the only thing I have that comes close to a site is this blog.

Bottom line: Thank you Hunchentoot developers, thank you clwho and clsql developers, you made my life a little bit better when it comes to web building ;-)