hey everyone! it’s been a busy week for me, and i’m finally getting a chance to write a nice blog ;). wednesday was my last day at usfi.. i wish all my ex-coworkers over there nothing but the best, you’re all great people.

the last 4 days i’ve had off, it’s been a good mini-vacation. thursday i went and got a long overdue haircut, picked up our new netflix movies (clerks, ella enchanted), watched clerks, and went out to red robin with paige. friday i returned the chair i borrowed from usfi, and bought myself a brand new global mika manager’s chair. saturday i drove down to austin to hang out with ivelin (my new jboss .. boss?) and his bulgarian friends.. i spent most of the night not understanding a damn word they were saying. but, when you have a few beers in you.. it makes it that much more fun. i also got to meet up with jeremy allen and a few of his friends.. hopefully we’ll get to hang out again in a few weekends when he comes back to dallas to visit. i also picked up my new dell latitude 8600 laptop which i’m writing this blog from tonight. my initial impressions are that it’s a pretty stable laptop.. the keyboard layout is sane (i.e, standard 102-key QWERTY, unlike my old Toshiba), typing isn’t much of a pain, it has a very nice 1680×1050 widescreen resolution, and the battery life simply blows my old laptop out of the water (~4-5 hours as opposed to 2?). the downsides? the processor doesn’t seem to be quite as fast as i would’ve liked, eclipse seems to start and compile the same as my desktop, but firefox and thunderbird seem to take a few extra seconds to start up (why?). more tidbits on the new laptop coming when i get some more experience with it.

i’ve been playing alot lately with Fedora Core 3 Test 1, and have to say that i really love it. every time i go away from fedora, i always come back and am pleasantly surprised with how much better it is than just about any desktop linux distro i’ve ever used. i guess you could say i’m faithful to redhat, as.. it’s been my distro of choice ever since redhat 6. mandrake is a nice distro, but buggy as all hell, and the administrative applications aren’t quite as pretty in my opinion, as fedora’s. here’s a nice little screenshot of my current desktop. pretty right?

in a bit of site news, my site can now be syndicated by my live rss feed. the “rss” button at the top right of the site will always take you to that url, and if you have the latest release of firefox, there should be a little “RSS” icon that shows up in the bottom right corner of the screen when you view my site. click on it, and click “Subscribe to Arcaner.com RSS Feed..” and you’ll get a bookmark folder with all my latest blogs (because i know you care that much!).

tomorrow marks my first day at jboss… which means i get to work on all the stuff i’ve been doing in my free time… for money! woohoo!