Geez, three weeks since my last update, and… well, frankly, not a whole lot has happened. Odd how, when you become an adult, your life suddenly becomes a lot less interesting from day to day. However, it goes without saying that at least a couple noteworthy things have happened, otherwise, why the post, other than to regurgitate my varied and disconnected thoughts into the digital ether?

So, what news? Well, first off, a photo from the garden. A while back, I decided it was about time to get some various plants planted. This included the usual garden, a mix of the everyday peas, carrots, spinach, and some zucchini, with rogue dill fragrantly invading the empty spaces, a hill of potatoes, just a few to see how they do, some sunflower plants, and last but not least, berry bushes, specifically raspberry and saskatoon. Well, in the weeks following, much has been afoot. The sunflowers are at least six inches tall, the various garden vegetables are coming along quite nicely, but most importantly, my raspberry bushes have started bearing sweet, delicious fruit. And to prove it, I even have a photo!

Incidentally, these are just the most recent of the ripened berries. I’ve already enjoyed a couple early fruit, and let me tell ya.. they are delicious.

Meanwhile, on the technology front, I finally decided to take the plunge and by my very own laptop. To be honest, the fact I hadn’t done this already was just a little bit ridiculous, and after spending many hours hacking away on the company tanktop (big, hot, heavy, and ugly), I finally decided the time was right to just buy one.

So, what did I buy? Well, I could’ve gone for a regular ol’ consumer laptop, something fairly inexpensive and functional, but such gear tends to be a little heavier, have poorer battery life, and most importantly, be somewhat fragile. So I decided to splurge on some gear that I knew would be heavy-duty, light weight, and generally capable of withstanding the abuses I’m likely to put it through.

I bought a Lenovo (previously IBM) ThinkPad. The T61, to be precise, which is the latest model in the T-Series.

Now, I know, ThinkPads tend to be a bit pricey, but for that, I got:

  1. A titanium roll cage,
  2. Best-in-the-business keyboard,
  3. Good battery life, which is even better with the Ultrabay battery I purchased,
  4. Quite thin and light, at just shy of 5 lbs,
  5. Quiet as heck.

Basically, exactly what I was looking for.

As for specs, it’s a 2Ghz Core2Duo, 2GB of RAM, 120GB hard disk, 1440x900, 14” wide-screen display (I would’ve prefered 1400x1050 standard-def, but they can’t be had… apparently the LCD manufacturers are shoving wide-screen displays down laptop manufacturers’ throats), nVidia Quadro NVS 140M video chipset, 802.11abgn, and a DVD-RW. Plus the usual assortment of USB ports, VGA out, a pair of PCI-Express slots, the Ultrabay, modem and NIC, etc.

As for software, it came loaded with Windows Vista business (which, for the record, isn’t nearly as bad as people claim, though I turned off Aero and SuperFetch pretty quickly), with the usual assortment of goodies, such as Office, and to my surprise, SQL Express 2005. In addition, after shrinking my NTFS partition by 40GB, I threw Ubuntu Gusty in, which, after a rough start, has worked fairly well (although sound doesn’t work at all, and I can’t adjust the screen brightness within X, which is pretty irritating). I even got suspend-to-RAM working after a bit of fiddling with settings in xorg.conf. I must admit, as a desktop OS, Ubuntu performs quite admirably, and is easily the closest I’ve seen to a truly mass-accessible Linux distribution.

So, overall, an excellent and worthwhile purchase! Of course, that basically blows my toy budget for the rest of the year.

Update:

I lied. The bastards gave me a trial version of Office. Oh well, OpenOffice it is!