He who dies with the most toys...

... wins.

There's nothing more exciting to a Sun geek than being surrounded by Sun hardware running Solaris or OpenSolaris. In my home office I have a Sun Blade 1000 (thanks Acclinet!) which Jenny uses, and an Ultra 20 (thanks Sun!), and in my basement storage area, I have my home server (an E220R), firewall (A Netra T1 105), and various other bits of Sun kit. Not bad for someone who has spent most of the last four years unemployed!

With some of the money I got from $TELCO in Edmonton last year, I decided to invest in a web-based business idea I had a couple of years ago. So I bought myself a shiny new "medium" spec Sun Fire X4200 (I'd sure like to compare it to a T2000 when I've finished developing the web application...), and a fine machine it is. You can imagine how green with envy I was then, to read fellow Sun-enthusiast and all-round nice guy Ben Rockwood's post about the huge stack of Sun gear he had at work on Friday last week! His new machines are currently stuck using Linux (ha!), but knowing Ben, they'll be running Solaris as soon as his application will allow.

My Ferrari is sick :-(

My Ferrari 3400 started misbehaving recently: it would turn itself off without so much as a by your leave. It happened a few days before the warranty expired, but when I first called Acer's tech support, they suggested that I try swapping out the 2 GB RAM I installed when I got the machine with the original memory. I did this, but it made no difference so I reinstalled the 2 GB after making sure the DIMM sockets were free from debris.

All seemd to be OK, until a few days later when the same thing happened. By this time, the warrany had technically expired, but the support guy I was talking with said that it wouldn't be aproblem, and that they'd fix my laptop under the warranty. He did advise me to remove my memory and 7200 RPM disk before returning it, which I did. That was last Friday. Purolater picked up the package on Friday, so hopefully it'll be with Acer either today or tomorrow.

Fingers crossed, but so far I have to say that I am impressed with Acer's technical support people. Until I get it back, I'm back downstairs in my basement. That's not so bad, though, as I'm working on my Ultra 20 with it's 24.1" Sun monitor. :-)