My office desktop, as of this posting

New desktop units for our department arrived in the office and, fortunately, I was one of the lucky code monkeys who would receive the spanking new units. I won’t go over the specifics, but let me just say that everything I wanted in a brand new PC were there: maxed out RAM and video card, a huge hard drive and (best of all) a brand new keyboard. (The keyboard deserves special mention because I’m a fast typist, and a keyboard full of sticky keys does affect my productivity.)

Getting Xubuntu to be installed took me all of a mere 15 minutes (including filling up the forms and restarting the PC). The best thing about the spanking new PC is that I was able to install all the (open source) apps in less time than it took me with my old PC: what took me three days to complete took me a mere three hours, all while doing my work. Not bad, considering that my new computer doesn’t even a multicore processor. The Gimp even starts up in less than six seconds. (Maybe I should test-drive this new PC with Blender and LAME, too.)

With a computer this fast, I’m seeing tons of improvement over my work. I’m now able to type roughly as fast as I can think. Programming now seems as natural as writing a blog post like this; now, I am no longer bound by sticky keys, buffer overflows and stuttering mouse cursors, but by imagination. After all, as the Wordpress mantra goes, code is poetry.