New laptop

This morning I woke up around 2:30, got up, had coffee, and did the initial setup for my new Acer laptop, which took about 90 minutes. I haven’t yet installed any of my tools. I must take it to work and copy from our server to my laptop all our setup files, which are used for building and releasing our software. We develop software and manufacture electronic guard patrol monitoring equipment for security guard companies. (I hate the left shift key, as it is tiny and hard to reach.) My new laptop will enable me to work at home on Fridays and commute to the office on Mondays and Wednesdays by public transportation, so I won’t need a car anymore.

Javier finally sent me his 2nd Java tutorial, which seems to be very high-level and unfortunately doesn’t include any Java code samples. I must reply and thank him for those tutorials. Today I’m going to work on my Arachneuron project. I just saved this document in Microsoft Works as a Word 97/2003 document, so I can probably get away with not activating (and paying for) the 60-day trial of Office 2007, for the time being. I now own 4 computers: my Acer laptop; my Dell desktop; an old Windows 98 desktop whose keyboard I’ve cannibalized for my Dell desktop, in an unsuccessful attempt at avoiding a bug in which my Dell desktop sometimes hangs when waking up from sleep mode; and an XO Laptop. The XO Laptop is a $175 laptop (it's green in colour) that runs Linux, and is distributed to schoolchildren in developing countries (see http://www.laptop.org). At one time I was hoping to develop a Linux version of my games program, now called JZoneGamer but it used to be Treenimation. In my 2 part-time jobs I use 2 more computers.

It’s starting to get light in the eastern sky; when that happens (during periods of insomnia), and not before, I eat breakfast. Time to chow down and then have a 2nd cup of coffee. It’s so much fun to have a new toy (my laptop), although installing software is boring. My sister is visiting me from Victoria starting on the May 2nd weekend, and she goes back to Victoria on May 13. She’s going to help me shop for a new couch, which she will be sleeping on. In the meantime I’m making do with my armchair (I threw out my sofa bed). On Wednesday I have to go to the Fred Victor Centre Volunteer Appreciation Dinner, from 5 to 8. I guess I will post this now, and then go back to using my desktop, which has a bigger screen, a mouse, and a nicer keyboard. One drawback of my desktop is that it takes almost 10 minutes to boot up. Bye-bye, laptop (after I post this). Sleep tight.