Sunday was spent babysitting the imports I set up and started at work on Saturday; thankfully it was spent at home away from the beeping. One unnoticed side-effect of the upgrade to 2.6.5 was a regression in my sound card behaviour.
ALSA was the suggested answer to my problem. Due to my plan never to have to compile anything manually on my home machine, I was a bit disappointed that there were no ALSA module packages for 2.6.5 in Debian unstable.
Thankfully, creating the packages was just as simple as creating the nVidia module package, one shell command to build a Debian package for the module. So, I can still say I haven't had to compile anything on my home machine.
Enabling ALSA not only fixed the sound card problems, but enabled all sorts of features in kmix, the KDE mixer program. kmix always seemed a little simple before, but now it allows me to change all sorts of aspects of the sound card, such as 3D sound, boosting of gain on the microphone, and so forth. I also haphazardly discovered I could set global shortcuts to affect the volume of individual channels, which I quite liked.
I also moved my mp3s of my CDs to my machine, and investigated JuK, a jukebox program for KDE. JuK impresses a bit with its ability to handle about a thousand songs with no sign of overload, global shortcuts to change songs, and a notification message above the System Tray as songs change, giving you the opportunity to see the song, and decide to move on to the next one if you so wish. It's simple usability things like this that endears me of programs. But I've come to expect that of KDE; it's always looking to create simple and elegant well-integrated programs.
After burning a CD with k3b (KDE burning software; also simple and elegant), I wondered if I could make it start up whenever I put in a blank CD. Didn't have much luck with that, but did discover hotplug. hotplug means that I don't have to configure anything for my USB mouse, my sound card, and so forth to automatically be set up for me when I boot or plug them in. Nice! Doesn't quite pick up my IDE CDROM drives, had to put ide-cd in my /etc/modules...