For much of my recent laptop life, I've been an ASUS partisan: I bought an EeePC in preparation for a training seminar I gave back in 2008, expecting to use my desktop computer for nearly everything. Instead I ended up using this 10-inch 1024x600 laptop to do nearly everything for the next six years, when I picked up a Vivobook SA-300. It was blazingly fast, by comparison, and with an SSD it was pretty brilliant.

The only thing that really got me was the screen: it was 1366x768, glossy, and touch. And not IPS. And also it suffered from some significant issues with the hinge / flex cabling (I assume) that they use to drive the monitor. Having come into my own with IPS monitors in my old job—a joy to look at, especially matte (although I know some hate this)—I really missed it. When the hinge started to go, I put up with it for awhile. I gifted myself a new machine over the Christmas break and finally got it set up.

It's a Thinkpad T440s. I know Real Thinkpad Afficianados are poised to castigate yours truly over his decision (the T450s, after all, has buttons instead of a quirky clickpad), but budget constraints often overrule other considerations. Getting a nearly-new T440s at half off with a RAM upgrade (12 gigs), i7, and other goodies seemed like a no-brainer, even if Lenovo has been devaluing the quality over the past few years. It's more compatible with Xubuntu than the ASUS was, has a 1080p IPS screen (oh, glory!), and should be able to sustain most of the tasks I'll throw at it as a developer.

Would that I were able to comment about more interesting things; those will come in time. I've begun work on a document store with RavenDB at work, while one of the other devs suggested looking into something like BrightStarDB. This whole transition into the world of .NET has been a bit rockier than I wanted (I'm still not really sold on IDEs, and the world of C#—and Java, to be fair—has changed quite a bit since my last attempts at programming anything interesting in those languages); all that means is that I have a lot to learn, and I guess that's the whole point, isn't it?)

The document store is set up to be a really interesting project, at least for a few days while I try to figure out how to make the pieces fit together. I still feel like Apache CAMEL is something I should know about, but Java is generally frowned upon in our group, which is solidly an MS-centric shop. That said, I'm still pulling a bit of weight with IronPython, which has proven to be a pretty good way to make some glue. Python still (for me) trumps all when it comes to productivity.