Long time no post.

So I realize that it's been quite awhile since my last post. It's not that nothing has happened for awhile, it's just that I don't always feel like writing when I get home from work, and it's sometimes hard to write at work. But today I don't have a whole lot going on at work, and I'm waiting for things to finish, so I figured I would write! It's been so long that I can't remember all the things that I've done, but I do remember some of them.

Two weekends ago, Amanda and I decided we would go downtown for dinner, and meet up with some friends later on. We took the bus, and wandered around for awhile looking for a god place to eat. We decided on a Shawarma place that I don't remember where it is. We got a dinner plate which included a shawarma, roast potatoes and a drink. It was very good! After that we wandered some more, and then went to Oh So Good (a dessert place we were introduced to by Yemisi. Read about it in my previous post about that night). It was about 9 o'clock when we finished our dessert, so we called our friend to see when they were coming downtown. He told us that they would be leaving shortly. So we wandered around the market some more, and made our way to the Rideau Center for a bit. We started getting impatient around 10:45, so we called again, and they were just leaving, so he told us to meet them at the bar they were going to; the Dominion. We had never heard of it, and didn't know where it was, so we did more wandering until we found it. It's a small bar next to Bare-Fax and Clasixxx, two streets north of the Rideau Center. The bar is pretty small, and I would classify it as a punk bar. There are two pool tables as soon as you walk in, some tables, and then the bar at the back of the room. Behind the bar was a big guy, with his hair done in 5 massive spikes sticking up and a leather jackets with hundreds of spikes in it. Typical punker. It actually wasn't that bad of a place. It wasn't very crowded, as it's not a very noticeable place. We grabbed some drinks, and waited fr our friends. While waiting, we saw an old friend from elementary school. We talked to him for a bit, then continued waiting, and waiting, and waiting. Finally they showed up around 11:30. Then we just drank and talked and met random people, and had a good time. Getting home wasn't that fun, because it was after 1 and, like always, I forgot that the Transitway buses don't run from their usual spot, so we trecked upto the bridge, only to have to trek back down to Rideau street (the Rideau Center was closed by now, so we had to walk around it) all in the rain. Then we got to the Hurdman station, and walked to our apartment, still in the rain. It was still a fun night though.

Work has been pretty busy too. A couple weeks ago the boss decided he wanted a new laptop (nothing is wrong with his old one, it's just more than a couple years old). The criteria for the new laptop were: it had to be the best available, and no price limit. The task was given to me to look up a suitable laptop. I started by visiting the Lenovo website . The first thing I saw was the Lenovo ThinkPad Reserve; a laptop with a leather casing. Not just a leather case for it to go into, the leather was actually the case! I thought it would be perfect for him! Looking more into it, the Lenovo page didn't have much on the actual laptop, other than it was encased in leather. Looking around the net, I discovered that the actual laptop wasn't really that great.Especially not with the $5000 dollar price tag on it! Doing more research, I discovered that the price was more for the support, which was pretty impressive. You basically get one guy that's assigned to your laptop, and they help you through the initial setup, the look after scheduled maintenance and any problems you might have. Also, if your traveling to major cities around the world, and something happens to your laptop, they will get somebody to come out and take a look at it (and before they leave, they do some cleaning to the leather) within the day. Also, depending on where you are, they will fly somebody to your location just to fix the problem. This service is available 24x7. There were only 2 things stopping us from getting this laptop: it only has a 12" screen, and it's a pain to attach it to a docking station (because of the leather) and the laptop was only a little bit better than the one he already had.
Next I looked into quad-core laptops. After much searching, I discovered that they aren't available yet. The only one I found was coming out sometime next year, and would cost roughly $10,000!! It was also top of line in everything though.
After much time spent customizing laptops (both for myself, and for the boss) online, I decided to look into the Lamborghini and Ferrari laptops. I was expecting them to be similar to the Reserve; looks great, but not much else. They actually weren't bad laptops, and the price was better than the reserve ($2000-$3000). I thought surely one of these would be good for him, as he owns many nice cars. Apparently though, he doesn't like Lamborghini or Ferrari cars!
So now I had to do more searching. I headed back to the Lenovo page, went past the Reserve and looked at their regular models. I narrowed it down to two models: the ThinkPad T61p and the ThinkPad X61. They are both nice laptops, but I wasn't sure the X61 would make it, because it's more of a travelers laptop (with the small 12" screen). The choice was made, and it was for the ThinkPad T61p. The only thing wrong with it was that it came with Windows Vista. That wasn't too big of a deal because we were just going to downgrade it to Windows XP. After a couple weeks, it finally arrived, and I got to be the first to open it up. It looked just like all our other ThinkPad laptops on the outside, but it was al different on the inside. This was my first trial of Windows Vista (I've been staying away from it until the drivers issues are fixed more). We decided that we would actually try it out to see how it would work. I actually really liked it. It took a bit of getting used to at first, but then I started getting the hang of things, and was installing and testing out our software on it. I only came across one program that didn't work: VNC (software we use to remotely connect to peoples computers to fix problems). I discovered that the problem was that the free version we were using didn't support Vista, and was easily solved by buying one license. Then we tried getting the laptop on the domain, and using roaming profiles. Turns out it's not easy to do. It took us about a week to finally get it figured out, after much searching online and playing around with things. After we finally got it on the doamin, we ran into many other problems (with printers, and some more remote connection software), but two weeks after we got it, it was finally ready to be given to the boss! I haven't heard how he likes it yet, but I haven't heard any complaints either, which is always a good sign.

Well, thats all for this post, but coming up very soon is a post about the party last weekend!! I'm going to try to write more often on here when stuff happens, instead of writing about it later when I don't always remember!