Merks' Meanderings: Out With the Old, In With the New

After a whirl wind week of upheaval, I've arrived in geek heaven. I blogged about the OMG Eclipse Symposium, but I didn't have time to blog about the next day, which I also spent in Ottawa. On Thursday, I visited the my colleges at the OTI lab. John Duimovich is my mentor so we had a chance for a good chat. It seems someone held him accountable for my impending departure; they've demoted him to flipping burgers and weenies. He mumbled something about less responsibility and more time for fishing.

It was great to spend time with so many of my platform buddies. I expect I'll be working with them a lot because of e4. That evening I'd booked a very late flight home so I could attend the Ganymede demo camp in Ottawa.

There were some interesting demos. When Lynn asked if I had anything to demo, I didn't realize I was committing to having to give an "official" demo. So I had an extra class of wine and showed the graphical Ecore Tools editor in action. As you know, I love that thing!

Ian gave out some prizes at the end. It was a fun event and I'm glad I stayed for it.

I got home late Thursday and then the next morning I began setting up my brand new T61p which I've named toad. It's got a 1920x1200 resolution display, duo core 2.5 GHz, 3 GM RAM, and 200GB drive. It's a heck of a lot better than what I had before! So it was time to ditch all the old hardware and setup all the new hardware. Check out the great setup I have now.

Of course KC uses my chair any time I'm not using it. There's a dog basket on the floor should the girls tire of being in my lap. I also have a nice foot rest. There's no longer a desktop machine, which was actually more of a floor top. Note how many frogs are in the room? If you could see the frog calendar up close, you'd see July 4th and July 18th marked with "woo hoo" because the former is my last work day (US Independence Day coincidentally enough) and the latter is the end of my two weeks of paid vacation time. Let me show you a closeup of the work area where all the magic happens.

Some things to note. I have a docking station that lets my Thinkpad hook up directly to the network, printer, keyboard, monitor, and power backup; though I do have wireless as well. I can't live without my little red ultranav mouse controller, so now I have two. See how I've hooked up the monitor as a dual monitor. I'll be able to keep things like Thunderbird and my chat windows in full view all the time; I've hooked Thunderbird up to the newsgroups and to my gmail account, Ed.Merks, using IMAP. Of course I have a pretty picture of the garden as background. I have pidgin installed, which I can use to chat with folks on IRC, Google, MSN, and Yahoo with just that one application. And I have Skype, which for $30 lets me talk to anyone in North America for a whole year; see the nice Logitech head set I use for that.

I installed Firefox 3.0 and went extension crazy. There are a few really cool ones, like Interclue which shows a little icon when you hover over a link and when you hover over that icon, it shows you a preview of the page at that link; the picture above shows this in action. I can also faviconize my tabs like the one for planet eclipse so I have room for lots of tabs. The tab to undelete a deleted tab is handy too.

Here's a close up of the little shrine I have for my treasured Eclipse Community Awards. Without community-inspired confidence, I would not have taken the bold steps I did this week.

There's a beautiful beta in the jar beside my monitor.

He and the blue damsel in the salt water tank right next to the jar like to square off through the glass.

While the frogs don't do a great job on eliminating the flies that occasionally sneak into the house, if KC doesn't get them (and he's quite good at that), I can always drop them into my pitcher plant.