What my camera-phone has badly photographed is my new Macbook installing Windows XP earlier yesterday. It's a 2.2 Core Duo model with 2 gig of RAM. Finally convinced the boss that these things aren't going away, and maybe it would be a good idea to have someone who knew a little bit about them, since more and more students and docs are showing up with them, wanting wireless and VPN.

I won't lie, it's been a little bit of a struggle so far. Took me about 20 minutes to figure out how to properly install Firefox (I wasn't getting the "unpack" view that was coming up), and another 10 to figure out that Tools-Options was now Firefox-Preferences. And getting XP installed was a headache: When they say SP2 required, they mean it. Also had a little glitch late yesterday where all of the sudden XP was freezing every time you'd boot it up (Safe Mode included), but that cured itself last night when I took it home. Something to do maybe with an Ethernet cable plugged in, based on wild-ass speculation on the internet? More looking into this today.

But Holy Jeebus is this a fine piece of hardware. Everything from the magnetically attached power to the nice solid feel of the screen as you open it. Reminds me a lot of the old school Thinkpads.

As far as the MacOS goes, I really haven't done a whole lot with it yet; customized the dock a bit, found a few utilities, etc. I'm making it my default OS on bootup to hopefully force me to use it for general surfing/webmail checking at least, but the long and short of it is that this is a work laptop and I'll NEED XP on it quite a bit (WSUS console, ePolicy Orchestrator, Group Policy Admin, etc). We'll see how it goes.

In other (late) news, KU won the Orange Bowl. Honestly I had a whole big analysis wrote up the other day on a diary I ended up ditching because I got busy with other stuff, but the long and the sort of it is this: Great win, should be pretty good next year as well but probably won't make a BCS bowl, but looks like Mangino has them going in the right direction anyway.

Still playing WoW, more so than any other game right at the moment (XBox Live issues have put a damper on CoD4). Got almost all my alts to the 42-48 range now, which feels like a dead zone after the new glory that is Dustwallow. Jenn's floating around the same levels with her characters, and my friend James has just recently been obsessed with leveling a warrior, and has hit 40. If we're not careful we'll soon be able to run with 3 member parties in Outlands.