As was previously mentioned, the laptop arrived on Saturday - I’m liking Windows XP more and more as I use it. I’m not sure exactly what it is that I like about it more than 98/NT, but it just feels nicer somehow.

I noticed that MS Agent is part of the OS now, which is interesting in and of itself. Merlin comes pre-installed, though I haven’t seen him pop up anywhere yet and try to zap me.

The multi-user features seem to work pretty well, and in that respect Windows seems to have caught up to the *nix’s a little bit.

When I said that the boot times seemed decent, I was just going on a general feeling - well, using the Hibernate feature on the laptop (which saves the computer’s state) I was up and running in ~15 seconds from power on. That is pretty fast in my opinion. Doing a complete power cycle (ie. windows shutdown/restart) took quite a bit longer, but I think for the most part I’ll just hibernate it - it’s dead simple to put it in hibernation mode too - just close the laptop up, and it does it all for you. The nice thing is that it doesn’t use any battery when it’s in hibernate mode - though it does take a little longer to boot up than if it were in standby - which does suck juice (it’d drain the battery in 3-4 days on standby).

Anyways, that’s enough about the stinkin’ laptop.

I watched two football games yesterday, and I have to say that the NFL game between the 49′ers and the Colts was a more entertaining game than the Grey Cup. It takes an unusually entertaining NFL game to beat most CFL games in my books, and that one fit the bill - it was relatively close until Peyton Manning started throwing interceptions in the second half.

Oh - I almost forgot to mention - we got the cruise booking information, and we got bumped up another couple of levels - we’re in room A743 on the Princess Sun, which looks like a pretty sweet spot to be in - if you want to get an idea of where that is on the ship - it’s right at the back, just off the deck, and only one floor below the pool etc. Should be fun anyways, and it’s only a little over a month away now!

Simpsons quote of the day: “To alcohol! The cause of, and solution to, all of life’s problems.” - Homer