Pheeeew! After 15 hours of traveling by ferry, car, and plane, it's good to be back in Los Angeles with my family for Thanksgiving.As an early Hanukkah present, my parents, who have been incredibly supportive of this whole quit my job and burn through savings adventure, replaced my dead Thinkpad T40 with a brand spankin' new Thinkpad T61. It's a beautiful machine with a 2.2GHz Core 2 Duo, 2GB ram, 100GB 7200RPM disk, 128MB NVIDIA Quadro video card, bluetooth, "Wireless N", and a 15.4" WSXGA+ TFT display that runs at a smokin' 1680x1050 resolution!
I'm super happy because it was getting a little frustrating to wait 20-30 seconds after hitting 'F5' in Visual Studio on the older X-series tablet I was borrowing over the last few months!
One of the funny things about the new Thinkpad I've noticed in my first hours using it is that they split the regular-sized left Alt key into 2 smaller keys -- on the left is the Windows key, on the right is Alt. Sony is the king of non-standard keyboard layouts with their compact VAIO laptops, and I absolutely can't stand VAIOs because of it. At first, the new Thinkpad key design thoroughly annoyed me because my thumb kept hitting "Windows" instead of "Alt", bringing up the new, horribly designed "Flip 3D" feature. While it makes for sexy TV commercials, it's a horrible way to switch between windows. But I've found a solution to this problem! In just a few seconds, I'll rebind Windows-Tab to Switcher -- at which point I hope my fingers will slip more to use Windows-Tab, since as far as I know Alt-Tab can't be rebound.
That's all for now. Happy Thanksgiving!!!
1 comment:
I also hate non-standard keyboard layouts. I had a Compaq laptop at my old job with the Ctrl and Fn keys swapped. Drove me nuts! My desktop keyboard at work now has a half-size backspace key, resulting in my constantly typing "\\\\" when trying to backspace. Why can't companies just stick to what everyone else does? They may think they're making improvements but they are not.
Also, happy belated Thanksgiving.
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