I slept in late this morning and didn’t start work until almost eight. Today ended up being one of the slowest days that I can remember at work. I have no idea what happened to make it so incredibly slow. I guess a number of development and release cycles just all hit their low ebb today and left me with almost nothing to do. It was awesome. The day just flew by.
Dominica and I tried to go out to Charlie Brown’s today for lunch as we have coupons for their all you can eat lunch salad bar. Liesl was not cooperative, though, she skipped her morning nap and took a really long nap right during lunch time so we were unable to go anywhere. So we are going to try tomorrow instead. So we just had a late lunch at the house.
I am getting a new laptop, yay! It has been forever since I got a new laptop. My current laptop, which Dominica uses almost constantly up in the living room, is an older HP Compaq unit with a 1024×768 display running Windows XP. It was the first generation of AMD Turion 64bit latops. A great unit. It just keeps chugging along doing its job without complaining at all. Quite the workhorse. It has seen a lot of abuse and just keeps going. Not a single problem with it. Even now it feels rather new except for the fact that it is all so outdated. I mean serious, only a single core? I think that it might be from around late 2004 but I am not really sure anymore. It is the nx6125. That laptop really solidified my faith in HP laptops. I’ve never seen anyone’s laptop last so long and perform so well. If it had a bit more memory I would be loathe to give it up but with a total of 768MB it is really not powerful enough for me to use for anything serious.
When I was in Germany I took Dominica’s laptop instead of my own because I needed some of the power and features that just are not available for mine. Hers is dual core and has 3GB (we bought 4GB but need to get a memory stick replaced) and has a higher resolution monitor while being slightly smaller and lighter. Much better for working remotely. So getting a laptop more like hers will make a lot of sense for me, especially with all of the traveling that we are going to be doing in the near future. Austin, Houston and Dallas all this month and then ten days in Orlando next month and then Houston for Christmas! I need a mobile platform that really performs.
So tonight I spent some time getting Dominica’s laptop all cleaned off and prepped so that tomorrow morning she can do a Windows 7 install on it. We have a copy of Windows 7 Business 64bit now and she has been eager to get off of Vista. I still had a lot of my Germany pictures on that laptop so I got the last of them (mostly just pictures from the Botanical Gardens in Osnabruck) edited and posted up to Flickr. The gardens are not too exciting for people looking to see what my trip or Germany is like but I do think that I got a nice “photo map” of the gardens for people interested in it and I do think that I pulled off a few decent shots there including one or two shots of yellow flowers and one abstract pink tree that I am really happy with. The day was incredibly overcast with no fear of rain giving me some wonderful mid-afternoon light in the high latitudes for shooting flowers.
Speaking of Germany, Katie sent me a link from the BBC today talking about the Varusschlacht (the Battle of Teutoburg Forest) and the Kalkriese site that I was over in Germany to see for the anniversary. Strangely the BBC ran the article two weeks after the actual anniversary and never included the date.
I have to work at eight in the morning tomorrow so the plan is that I will get up and get to work right away and Dominica will spend the morning installing Windows 7 on her laptop.