Pleasant VexMeet this evening. I sometimes wonder just how bored people must get hearing me prattle on about things. I really need to get out more so I'm not so driven to talk when I see people... coincidentally...

ACI has loaned me a laptop so I can work on various projects in locations other than my white-walled little room (YAY!). It's a very sweet little machine, a Toshiba Satellite 5100. It's a media-friendly desktop replacement laptop, much higher-end than the laptop I've been borrowing from my sister (though that probably has a much faster processor).

Decent keyboard layout, nice keyboard feel for typing. The case is solidly constructed, very stiff, no give at all. It's a rather large machine physically, much thicker and heavier than the Acer. Battery in this particular machine is pretty short-lived (at least, according to the Windows XP monitor), looks like it has a memory at 66% and simply can't charge beyond that. Not a big deal, I'm not doing a lot of commuting; I can plug in most places I want to work (one of the bigger needs for the laptop being working down at Linux Caffe with Seneca when she joins the company).

I'm not sure if it's just the enormous quantity of caffeine I had this evening, or the prospect of being able to work somewhere other than sitting in this room, but I'm actually giddy with delight :) . Toys are so much fun when they're "yours"!

I'm installing Gentoo on it now (I use Linux for all development work, so until it's installed it's just a (pretty) paperweight). For the linux-o-philes in the audience I'll record the steps involved in the extended part of this post (I'll edit the post as the process continues). I'm planning to install Asterisk on the box to allow for development and demo work. I'll also have a Cinemon demo/devel instance on it, of course. I also want to set up an IPSec VPN so that I can access my workstation from remote locations.