Last Friday my Powerbook died, and I was able to sneak it into the shop right before the AppleCare warranty expired. Unfortunately over the past few months I’ve come to the conclusion that the performance and heat produced by my 1.5Ghz Aluminum powerbook leave me wanting, and so after much thought (and endless spec comparisons) I elected to plop down a heavy sum of money on a new laptop. For the first time in quite possibly 10 years (I feel old) I’ve decided to give a PC laptop a try again and somewhere after June 6th I’m expecting a HP dv9700t to arrive at my door. Here are the basic specs:

• Upgrade to Genuine Windows Vista Home Premium with Service Pack 1 (64-bit)
• Intel(R) Core(TM) 2 Duo Processor T9300 (2.50GHz)
• 17.0″ diagonal WSXGA+ High-Definition HP BrightView Widescreen Display (1680 x 1050)
• 4GB DDR2 System Memory (2 Dimm)
• 50% OFF 512MB NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GS!!
• HP Imprint (Radiance) + Fingerprint Reader + Webcam + Microphone
• Intel(R) PRO/Wireless 4965AGN Network Connection
• 240GB 7200RPM SATA Dual Hard Drive (120GB x 2)
• LightScribe SuperMulti 8X DVD+/-RW with Double Layer Support
• High Capacity 8 Cell Lithium Ion Battery

Sadly, HP doesn’t offer Linux out of the door on this model, and I’m more than a little skeptical about the claim of 3 hours (especially with two hard drives), but we’ll see. I was very happy to find out that HP offers 21 days where I can return the item if it “isn’t what I wanted”. For me this means that if it is, klunky and awful I can return it and then just save my money for a Macbook Pro. The difference in price is really pretty profound, almost $1000.00.
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I recently found Alexander Müller’s CPPUnit howto to be very helpful. The sources he provides are also quite useful.

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For all those math geeks out there:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9dpTTpjymE

Being that I am probably going to take Linear algebra next enrollment, I may want to watch these: (rush to the head)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EX_is9LzFSY

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q9OkFTDG4fY

This week was a busy week, I started my new position as an SDET at Isilon Systems and started Summer 01 enrollment session at Regis University. This session I am taking CS430 – Operating Systems and CS436 – Object Oriented Programming in C++, both of these classes promise to be a bunch of fun for someone who is interested in these topics to begin with.
As per the job, it’s been a ton of fun. Isilon has some really awesome people and a product that is certainly neat to work with. I’m glad to be working there!
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Today was a rather large day, I started CS430 (Operating Systems), CS436 (C++), and a new job at Isilon Systems as an SDET.

I’m sitting in front of my in-law’s new 65 inch television and connected Wii, it’s huge, certainly a home-theater experience.

This week marks the end of my time at F5 and new prospects await me at Isilon Systems. I’m glad to have worked at F5 and sad to leave, however the opportunity at Isilon is a significant one for me. For as long as I can remember I’ve wanted to work on operating system development directly, and at Isilon I will write performance testing software that does precisely that.

Obviously I was drifting in and out of consciousness when I wrote:

SWORD and DWORD, although different, have the same the same degree of passion.

assembly language and midnight just do not mix :)

No moar!

Good stuff:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0khsot_hNWs