Last night my laptop died, after at least a couple of years of devoted service. I didn’t lose anything (paranoid backup strategy) except a few photos from our trip around Greece. (Even most of these will have survived on Olga’s laptop, but I think there were a few only I had.) In other words, not nearly the disaster it could have been. (The photos and writeup of the trip will be a bit more delayed though.)

But this weekend I’m off to Berlin for a week, where I will give three talks (two of them more working-session-ish, but still a pretty serious workload). Two of the three aren’t really written yet: I planned to do some work on the train and some work there. So I needed a machine, and fast.

Which is by way of semi-justification of the fact that this post is written on my brand new eee pc. It’s a teeny-tiny laptop and so far I’m very happy.1 I’ve got it running an eee-friendly ubuntu flavour (easy peasy), and while I write this post Amarok is playing my music for me. Most importantly, I’ve installed latex and emacs and all the bits and pieces I need to work on my talks for next week. Success!

So: the laptop is dead, long live the laptop.

Notes:

  1. The only major snag I’ve run into is the half-size right shift key, which means I keep hitting ‘up’ or ‘enter’ when I want uppercase. But I’ll get used to that, I’m sure. [↪]