Finally!

Wohoo!!

My computer's finally in!

It's about two and a half weeks into teaching classes, almost a month since I came back from holidays, and the new desktop computer that I was to get over the summer to replace my ailing (& memory-starved) laptop has finally arrived. Our tech guys at CST have been working hard to get labs up & running & instructors fitted out with their new computers, but it's been a time-crunch for them because of the [very] late arrival of all the hardware (and having to work around times that labs are free for maintenance. But at last my computer's in, and I now have the fun time of getting it re-configured back to what I need it to be.

It's times like this that I think of the blogs I read recently on DotNetNuke, where Joe Brinkman wrote about using virtual machines to allow him to painlessly upgrade hardware without having to go through all the re-install work to get his programs up & running. Nik Kalyani also blogged about how using virtual machines is taking away the "bad new" part of the "good news/bad news" of hardware upgrades.

I guess I'll get into the virtual machine approach to, just because I know that I'm going to want to upgrade my home hardware very soon, and I find that I have more (& better) software at home for development than what I'm often using at work ('cause I try to honor the license agreements of not installing software on multiple machines, even if I'm the only one ever using the software, and the machines are miles apart). It would be nice to just have the needed virtual machines ready to go, and I could move around more freely without suffering productivity losses over the "oh, yeah, that program's on the other box."