So my company has increased its I.T. spending the past few months. This is good news for many reasons, but the two that pop into my mind is (1) I get to play with new technology, (2) it may mean the I.T. industry as a whole is picking up. The sales rep at Dell said that this month has been really good there, and it's only the second week. I know things won't be like the good ol' dotcom days that to this day seem like a dream, but I'm looking forward to being able to get my hands on some big iron again...building Frankenstein-style boxes is ok, but as a company gets larger it becomes downright unmanageable when you don't have standardization.


So we just purchased a PowerEdge 2650 which is kind of middle-of-the-road hardware, but really nice to work on. Dell is really slashing prices nowadays, probably because they're getting ready for some next gen 64-bit servers, and also because they need to compete with IBM and Sun. We also purchased a couple of new Latitude 500's. I'm on a circa 2000 Latitude now and let me tell you, the difference is night and day. The new Latitudes are pretty sweet. It's got nice style, it's pretty thin and light, and is chock full of features. This Latitude I'm on now is fairing quite well now that I put Red Hat 8 on it. The biggest (and possibly only) gripe I have about this laptop is the freakin keyboard. Sometimes the shift key doesn't work, sometimes I hit a key once and it enters the character twice, and it has a really poor feel to it (man I wish I had a ThinkPad keyboard on this). But it works, and it's better than nothing right?