It's been three years since I purchased my last laptop, and there was a President's Day sale going on at Lenovo[1] that I was able to access by virtue of my affiliation with Red Hat, and my SBH reminded me of the fact several times with accompanying hints that I'd been wanting a new laptop (I don't recall that, but never mind), so I went online and ordered one. 2.3GHz, 3MiB cache, 500GiB disk, 4GiB RAM, 15.6" screen, 1920×1080 resolution.
Also within the last few days I contacted my DSL provider to see if there was a better rate plan available. There was (is), in fact — 4x the download speed and 5 more static IPAs for essentially the same price. Signed up for that, you betcha. Hopefully it'll make the Vonage VoIP quality better.
A couple of weeks ago, longtime friend and co-author Rich Bowen let me know
he was going to be in the Triangle area, so we made arrangements to meet & eat at the ∞brasa Brasilian
Steakhouse[2] in Brier Creek. After getting
totally stuffed with meat, we wandered over to the nearby Barnes & Noble bookstore to sit ans schmooze for a while. (Brasa had some
really loud live music going on.) While we were there, I used my iTouch to connect to the free attwifi network the bookstore offered — and have
regretted it ever since. My iTouch has been horribly, horribly slow ever since — slow like falling back to sleep before recognising that I had, in fact, done the 'slide to
unlock' gesture. No joy in finding out why online, nor from turning it all the way off and back on, so I think it's time to try the resent-from-iTunes path.
[1] I know, I know — I swore I wasn't going to order from Lenovo any more after the they-won't-rebate-Windows débaclè. But the ThinkPads are still my favourite laptop hardware: sturdy, reliable, and well-supported on Linux. So sue me.
[2] That's what their logo looks like: ∞brasa. Srsly.