The Jason Salas Experience

I'm no one's biological father, but I'm now parent to one bad boy. I finally got my 2GHz CPU/2GB RAM/big-ass display IBM R52 Thinkpad on Friday after what seemed like a lengthy wait and spent Saturday morning setting it up. It didn't take me as long to configure, what with Office 2003 already pre-installed (which would have taken 40 minutes), and the fact that I gave up using Visual Studio. Thanks to the fact that I backup my Firefox start pages in Writely, I copied my profile over to the new machine and just logged on to about 30 different Web 2.0 services one time. Here's a snapshot of how I spent my morning:

• Had a bitch of a time getting IIS 6.0 to install...don't know why it wouldn't show up in the admin snap-in, but it finally worked
• I couldn't get IBM's fingerprint reader software to recognize my index or middle finger (the latter was more prominently exhibited after not being able to login the first few times). It still doesn't work, veen after washing my hands.
• Downloaded Google Pack, which ironically overwrote the existing install of Norton Antivirus 2005, forcing me to re-update my virus definitions. For the same reason, Microsoft Firewall is also not playing well with AdAware.
• I rocked out to Google Earth for about an hour (especially now that Guam's included), which ran REALLY quickly. Nice.
• Proving my Like a man possessed, I removed every single nuance of Windows and/or Office that I don't need (games, Office Assistant, Outlook Express).
  
• Ran Microsoft Update and rebooted.
• Setup Firefox with 15 imported default start pages, and in 3 minutes got all my web apps ready; setup Thunderbird
  
• Installed Flash 8 Video Encoder and ImToo MPEG Encoder (used to record and convert clips for KUAM.com, respectively). Encoding/rendering jobs that previously took 45 minutes after I got off the air now get spit out in 4 minutes. Sweet...I've been working the last 6 weeks from 7am-11pm, so hopefully I'll get home at a decent hour.
  
• Downloaded/installed iTunes (which included DirectDraw and Quicktime support for the Flash encoder)
• Downloaded/installed Analog X's FastCache (which no one should be without...ask Chris Pirillo). But due to the fact that my ISP's weekend support hours extend no longer than 1pm, I still can't add-in their DNS servers
  

I've still got SQL Server 2000, PC Anywhere and our custom newsroom management app yet to install, but that'll be it. The end result is that because it's an OEM laptop, registration for Windows and Office is required...and the latter won't take over the Internet because Microsoft continues to see Guam as a non-U.S. territory, forcing me to have to call MS Australia to register. So I've got a decaying number of times I can use Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Access (I waxed Outlook and Publisher as part of my paranoid cleaning described above). This should hold me for a few years. The last time I got a machine was in the Fall of 2002, so this little guy's gonna put in his work.

My eye's already on a Mac.