Bringing home a new laptop

In less than 2 weeks I'll be heading to Gillette, Wyoming on my motorcycle for the annual BMW Rally. This trip is going to be a vacation and my wonderful wife is riding with me. So that means we have to pack for 2 people for 10 days using the hard bags, top case and tank panniers. Both of us need to stay connected while traveling so that means carrying 2 laptops.

My current HP dv8000 17" laptop would just barely fit in the door of a side case and would easily fit in the top case. But either place it would be taking up a lot of space and adding weight to the bike. So what's the logical thing to do??? You guessed it, go down to Fry's and buy a cheap 14" or 15" laptop to be my new moto-laptop.

Fry's had a sale going on today on certain laptops. I had 2 primary criteria I wanted to fulfill in this purchase. First it needed to be smaller and lighter than my current laptop. Second I really wanted a trackpad on/off switch. Other than that I wasn't really picky as long as it was cheap. Since this wouldn't be my main development box speed wasn't a major issue. It was more of a case of value once my primary criteria had been met.

I narrowed it down to 2 different HP's and a Sony Vaio. The Sony got knocked out when I realized it didn't have the on/off switch for the trackpad. So then it was a choice between 2 HPs. In the end I spent the extra bucks to get an AMD Turion 64 X2 w/ 3GB of ram, 250GB HD and a web cam. I the extra space and ram were attractive to me. The web cam could provide a challenge for me to work on next year before I take off to Alaska.

I don't know what stars have aligned but it seems I found every single new person at Frys during this process. The friendly sales person that helped me must have done something wrong because when I got to the checkout a manager drug him off to the side and started reading him the riot act. My clerk was a little confused about something but finally continued on. Then after swiping my card there was a problem which required a "csc". So the clerk's manager came over and he got in trouble for not checking something on my I.D. or some such non-sense. Finally I walk out with a new laptop and a $799 credit card bill that I'll have to pay next month when the statement arrives. At least the money is already in the bank.

I get the laptop home and start unpacking it. HP does a fantastic job with their packaging so I follow along with the pictures and do what it tells. When I power up the laptop though my screaming fast 2GHZ AMD Turion 64 X2 comes to a screeching installing the massive amount of garbage that's included with it. And I have to wait while Vista updates itself. So that's when I started this blog post.

Well all that's left now is to wait on the download of Fedora 9 and then I can wipe this thing clean and see how well it does on my OS of choice. In the mean time I might down FireFox 3 and see what all the fuss is about. According to Azureus I have at least another hour before the DVD iso will be down.

More to come on this experience when I have Fedora installed.

Putting on the 4th annual Walters BBQ

Yesterday was the 4th Annual Walters BBQ and it was an overall success. Each year it has gotten larger and larger. I'm always amazed by a few friends every year and this time was no different.

First a quick little history of the BBQ. I'll spare you the story of why I started BBQ'ing but let's just say it had to do with a 1 week grocery bill of over $300 and a lot of fillet mignon while I was alone at home. Back when we owned My Linux ISP (or when it owned us), Reagan and I thought it was a good idea to have an annual company party so everyone could get together and enjoy a meal. We'd cook steaks and stuff that we'd see on the bbq and grilling TV shows. But when we sold the company that tradition went away too. Wanting to have an excuse to get together with the old staff and stay in touch with some of my more memorable clients we started the annual Walters BBQ in June of 2005. The idea was to have it the weekend before the 4th of July so maybe some party attendee would invite us to their party as well.

Fast forward to today and we have now successfully completed 4 of these events. Each year the guest list has grown larger and larger. For the past 2 years we've had some friends from Dallas come down to help with all the work of set up and tear down. Without our friends we wouldn't be able to put on such an event.

This year amazed me a little more though. At the end of the day, all but one of the people that stuck around to help clean up had been involved as crew members on past Avon and Susan G Koman breast cancer walks that I've participated in. On those walks people from all over come together as a crew to support the walkers and help pull off the event. Yesterday felt about the same. People were outside folding up tents, cleaning up tables and picking up trash. Inside they were taking turns on the dirty dishes, picking stuff up, and putting away the food. For a brief time I had to look around to make sure I was still at home and not out on a breast cancer event. It was amazing. When all the heavy lifting had been done we all enjoyed a little time visiting in the backyard before the skeeters got too big.

Next year will be the 5th annual Walters BBQ and should be even bigger. There's some discussion about the event date as I'm planning on being in Alaska on June 21st riding my motorcycle. No matter when we put it on, I'm sure it'll be great. Especially having friends like ours.


For the numbers folks, we used:
42 racks of baby back ribs
70lbs of brisket
48lbs of pulled pork
2 105oz cans of baked beans
2lbs of pintos
3 105oz cans of whole potatoes
320lbs of ice

and a lot of other stuff too.