Back to the grind

The longest vacation I've taken in years ended today. Nobody likes to return from vacaction, but today was a pretty good day.

First off, I had my annual performance review, which went quite well.

Secondly, the Dell Latitude D600 laptop which we ordered for use as a test box came in while I was on vacation. w00t! It's basically an upgrade version of my daily use machine. Same CPU (P4M @ 1.4 GHz) but with 1 GB of RAM, an 80 GB hard disk, and a DVD-ROM drive. It was supposed to have a DVD burner but our purchasing department fouled up. (We got a second, identical unit for my co-worker, and his also came with the DVD-ROM, so I don't think it's a Dell SNAFU.)

The only software that came on the Dell aside from XP Pro was WinDVD, so I spent the afternoon installing stuff like antivirus, antispyware, IM clients, Ethereal, and various other utilities. Since I'll eventually need something on the box for taking notes, I decided to give Abiword a try, since it's so lightweight. I've putzed around a little bit with it on Linux, but not in quite some time. I'll probably load it onto Bagend at home.

I'll add some more stuff on the Dell tomorrow, as well as turning into a dual boot machine with SuSE 9.2 Pro.