Thank You!

Thanks to all for the birthday well-wishes. Because of work commitments and mild case of the sniffles, I haven't exactly been in much of a celebratory mood but am looking forward to a birthday dinner with the guys tonight and/or tomorrow evening.

I'm now 46, which is turning out to be a pretty good age to be. Many kids I grew up with didn't reach voting age so I consider myself lucky. I've had a few health stumbles over the past few decades but they've been relatively minor and easily treated with current medical technology: we couldn't have said such a thing only a century ago.

I'm still happily employed in an industry which didn't exist 30 years ago. I've lived through two major recessions and a couple of minor ones but escaped largely unscathed. Since I reached the age of majority, the Berlin Wall and Soviet communism have vanished, the cold war ended but we've since been in two Middle East wars and a number of smaller clashes around the planet. The world has changed multiple times over, sometimes for the worse. 30 years ago, I wondered if my generation could survive the growing nuclear stockpiles, but I'm now vastly more worried about damage done to the world by corporate malfeasance.

30 years ago, we were awestruck by images from Voyager 1 & 2 but the launch of Galileo probe was delayed by the Challenger disaster. Now we eagerly await images from New Horizons of Pluto, have multiple satellites orbiting Mars and three on its surface, sent probes into comets and have counted hundred of extra-solar planets. 46 years ago, the year I was born, man wouldn't walk on the moon for another 2.5 years.

It's been a good run thus far but at 46 I'm looking more often towards preparation for my retirement at (hopefully) age 60. Well, that and wondering how I'm going to get done all the things I have on my calendar for the next few months.

New Laptop

My old Asus EEE PC netbook is still working well, but it's gradually showing its age (four years). Being a netbook, it was always a tiny, light-weight little worker: the screen was unusually small (600x1024), the keyboard reduced enough to make typing a challenge and it has only 2GB of RAM and a 900MHz CPU running Windows XP. At home, I connected it to an external monitor to make it a bit easier on my eyes.

The greatest thing of this little beast is that it travels like a dream: it's so much smaller than any other laptop I've ever had. For my regular trips to/from the data center and occasional trip to the corporate overlords in California, it's been fantastic.

The new machine is an Asus X501A. 15.6" screen, a full keyboard, 2.3 GHz CPU, 4GB of RAM, 320 GB hard drive. It's not a top-of-the-line model by any stretch but it's the same weight as my old netbook while three times more powerful. And it cost about $300, more or less the same as my netbook four years ago, a price point at which I consider the machine to be essentially disposable.

The new beast is running Windows 8, which has been a bit of a pain. The OS itself isn't too bad --it feels a lot like Windows 7-- but they've slapped on this top-coat of pain called "Metro," their user interface which replaces the old Start button & menu. Flipping between apps & screens is an enormous pain compared to the old stalwart versions of Windows but I'm gradually (and grudgingly) getting used to the interface changes. The extra hardware speed has helped persuade me to keep plodding through the Win8 suckage.

All of my regular apps have been successfully transferred to the new laptop, including Vic Ceder's CSDS application used for my square dance calling, including Winamp and Pacemaker, the plugins which control MP3 playing. My VPN to the office is working well so I can travel with the new machine as needed. Printing is working as it should too.

The only thing left to tackle is some form or version of MS Office, although I'm probably going to go with some Office clone rather than experiment with the latest cloud-based or subscription-based versions of the original package. I'm open to suggestions!