Last Week, Part One

Last week was a particularly busy one…

Monday

Last Monday was my first full day at the new office, followed by dinner in Roncey at Barque Smokehouse, which may be the city’s best barbecue place. It was me, Mom, a friend of Mom’s and Joel, who was in town to do a shoot of an upcoming Netflix series. I recommend their sampler platter, which gives you ribs, chicken and brisket along with your choice of side. Note how healthy my sides are!

Tuesday

On Tuesday, I attended a presentation at Hewlett-Packard in Mississauga, just down the street from my office. They were showing off some of their server and cloud computing offerings. There was some pretty interesting stuff, and it’s likely that SafeMDM, the mobile device management software that my startup is building, will probably run on it.

At the end of the presentation, they asked us to fill out some evaluation forms where we’d rate various aspects of the event on a scale of 1 to 5, after which they’d use the forms to pick out the winner of the raffle. There were only five of us in the audience, and thanks to the combination of good odds and my generally good luck, I ended up winning the prize: an HP Mini 210 netbook.

People who know me professionally or have read my blog are aware of what I think of netbooks, but hey: I’m not going to turn down free tech goodies! I was more than pleased to claim my prize, which I intend to use in some experiments and arty projects as if it were a Raspberry Pi-type of computer. Here’s my quick and dirty unboxing shot. It’s not as slick an unboxing experience as you’d get with something from Apple (and I’m glad to see that HP is acknowledging that they need to pay more attention to design), but their packaging tends to be better than most other PC vendors’:

I think I let out a pretty loud cry of “Awesome!” when I pulled away the big “Instruction/Installation” book and discovered that my new netbook was a very funky shade of purple:

Here’s what it looks like with the cover open. My only real complaint is that it has one of those French/English bilingual keyboards. I have no beef with supporting French; it’s just that the bilingual keyboard adds a “French quotes” key at the expense of the left Shift key, which is cut down to half the size to accomodate it. I always end up hitting that extra key instead of the Shift key, and it drives me crazy:

It came with Windows 7 starter, which I’ll upgrade when I’m a little less busy:

However, I’ve installed Ubuntu on it as well. Note how well the default purplish desktop wallpaper matches the netbook’s colour scheme:

I really like my new toy!