I have been using an IBM ThinkPad 765 -- 133 Mhz Pentium with 2 Gb hard drive (maybe 2.1?) and 64 Mb RAM. That is being replaced by a ThinkPad 600E -- 300 Mhz Pentium II with 6.4 Gb hard drive and 64 Mb RAM. This is a big step in power and storage capacity, but I need more memory and my manager has told me to get whatever I need... somewhere around 300 Mb if I can get it stuffed in there. It has a DVD/CD drive (somebody told me today that I could use it on an airplane to watch my own movie... the battery is supposed to be good for three hours of sustained use).

Spent much of my time today moving files from my old laptop to our LAN and then deleting them from the C drive, running ScanDisk and then defragging. I hadn't realized how long it had been since I had last cleaned up the drive... the defragging process went on and on and on... finally I cut it short at 80 percent complete because I needed to get back into Lotus Notes and do some stuff before I went home. It was a typical day in that respect; I came in a little before 8:30 a.m., worked through lunch (ate two oranges and some carrots at my desk) with the hope of leaving by five p.m., but it was 6:20 by the time I got out to my car and (since I was driving on fumes and had to stop for gas) seven o'clock by the time I reached home.

I'm taking Tuesday and Wednesday off. I'd like to drive up to Boston one of those days (most likely Wednesday) to the Museum of Fine Arts. Tomorrow I'll try to get some chores done around the house and maybe Nancy and I can get in a walk on the beach.

Thursday and Friday I'll be back in the office, finishing off the process of cleaning up my old laptop (It will be going to the woman who functions as our department administrator to replace or supplement her desktop machine.) and busily preparing for a class I'm teaching next week. I've got a lot of work to do: prepare the course infrastructure on the host (make sure the COPYLIB is set up, the needed files are there, etc., test everything), gather the needed books and manuals, prep the classroom, generate updated hardcopy instructions for the class exercises (need to fix one that has gotten out of date), and get my own brain in gear for the course. Although I have been teaching this course (or an ancestor of this course) since Spring of '96, (and I completely rewrote the entire course two years ago), it was only taught once last year (and that was a somewhat customized version). It should keep me busy.