robglazebrook.com

Okay, so it was my intention not to update again until later this evening, but all of a sudden, I have too much to say, and I’m fairly certain I’ll pop or burst or something equally violent and unappealing if I try to keep it all in.

Geeks of the world, you are jealous of me.

I just got the opportunity to partake in one of the most wonderful, self-indulgent practices rituals of the modern government-run institution: the End of the Year Purchases.

We just got back from the university book store with $1400 worth of goodies to play with. Among all the other, smaller niceties (including $150 worth of books I got to pick out and a new 256MB USB Key drive), we nabbed three items for our own personal gratification:

My boss, for himself, got a Tungsten C, one of the beautiful new PDAs from Palm that features a 400MHZ processor, a built-in keyboard and 802.11b wireless access. Though we didn’t realize it at the time, this gives the three of us (Lorenzo (my co-worker), Dwight (my boss), and Rob (my self)) an excellent opportunity to test the three major PDA operating systems: my boss’s Tungsten runs Palm OS 5.2, Lorenzo just purchased a new Toshiba e740 (though it hasn’t arrived yet) running Pocket PC 2002, and my pretty new Sharp Zaurus 5500 runs a version of Linux called Embedix. We’ll also get to test the various virtues of PDA wireless access: Lorenzo’s and Dwight’s both have built-in wireless, and my CompactFlash wireless card should arrive this afternoon. :)

For Lorenzo’s work system, we picked up an NVidia GeForceFX 5600 with 128MB RAM. We both have nice new Dell Optiplex GX280’s with 2.8GHZ processors and a gig of RAM to play with, but the graphics cards sucked. That’s no longer a problem.

And so we can test the differing virtues of the two graphics card giants (this is how we rationalized it to Dwight), I got an ATI Radeon 9600PRO, also with 128MB RAM. We’ll begin testing them, I’m sure, over the lunch hour. :)

Wow. My hard heart (whoops) is still racing with the fun and geeky excitement of it all. Today, I think, the hardest part of work will be the part where I have to leave.

(be sure to read the previous entry, posted a few short hours ago)