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.