Guess what my employer gave me? (Hint: squeeeeee!)

I was at work on Wednesday when one of the managers walked up to me and handed me a box with "IBM" and "Intel Inside" on it. I squeed. Totally.

I now have an IBM Thinkpad T42p, also known as Pimp Fuqyng Cewlleness. It's still their property and it had WinXP Pro pre-installed. However, it has the power to run VMWare so I may just make a couple Linux images and keep them on hand. It's a Pentium M 2 GHz with a full meg of on-die L2 cache, meaning it's still smooth at dealing with processing even when it's unplugged and running at the low=power 600 MHz. It's also got a gig of RAM and built-in wireless. It's pimptastic! It even goes three hours on a charge.

I asked whether this meant I was getting some new, frightening assignment. "No," the manager replied. "It just means we think you'd benefit from having one. You'd get more work done outside the office, since you're always here." Wow. They ARE paying attention!

I had a good Thanksgiving dinner at chaiya and hakamadare's. All sorts of good folk were there -- dimers and lightfixer, for example. I finally got to meet goldsquare, who is strangely not gilded in real life.

I am grateful, actually -- the house-sitting is starting to make sense. I finally got all the towers on the baker's rack, plopped a monitor, keyboard and mouse on a table upstairs, plugged them into the four-way KVM switch and got one of my older dualies booted. Then said box proceeded to have a hissy fit about connectivity. Fah king. More on that once I've fixed it.

graciana will be up to visit this weekend. This should rock. She's good for helping me to feel -- uh, normal. It's odd how that works. Certain friends are good at making me feel right with the world simply by hanging out.

I volunteered for a four-hour shift at work today, mostly because I got so tired of hearing bosses whine about it and threaten to assign it to someone at random. Noon to four of Canadians calling doesn't sound too bad. I shall endeavor to help.

-life in the shiny box, Dante