Two days before Christmas someone was kind enough to break the window of my trucklet and steal, among other things, my main laptop.  It was a year old, but more than adequate for another year or so.  I was parked less than two hours in an office parking lot in a relatively "good" part of town.  Bummer.

I went for two months with a borrowed laptop (thanks Paul!), but finally replaced it last week.  The new one's a screamer with an i7 quad-core processor, 500Gb drive at 7200 rpm and 4Gb of quick memory.  

The thing that amazes me is how much I have to do to a machine to get it usable these days.  I've spent 4 days of downloading, configuring, and scratching my head trying to understand how to do what needs to be done on Windows 7 64.  The previous machine was Vista 64-bit, so you'd have thought they'd be similar, but "7" has some wonderful quirks of its own. 

My main gigs are usually M$ Sql Server, but I also do MySQL, Oracle, DB2, PostgreSQL and other weird stuff.  Along with Microsoft platforms I'm frequently on Linux and Unix so I need the whole gamut of open-source tools too.  Configuring the new beast has been educational and lots of fun, but I'm ready to get back to work!

Btw, the trucklet has also been upgraded - it nwo has a laptop cable-lock.