This post is coming to you from my new Mobile Workstation.  Having seen The Vanderboom’s Alienware M17 I knew something similar would be my next laptop but I wasn’t ready to purchase.  My wife’s venerable Tablet PC dying initiated a chain of hand-me-downs ending in me getting a maxed-out M17.  This thing is definitely the nicest laptop I’ve ever owned, and is barely any larger than the Dell Vostro it replaces.

• Vista Ultimate x64
• 17” 1900x1200 screen
• Core 2 Extreme Quad 2.53ghz
• 4GB RAM
• 7200RPM drive
• Blu-ray drive

About the only thing I didn’t upgrade is to get the solid state drive.  When prices come down I’ll upgrade that.

I went for a quad core rather than the fastest dual core in order to help keep forcing myself to think in terms of parallelism when I need a speed increase.  I also have a long-incubating Parallel Programming in .NET talk that I’ve held off on giving publicly because, well, the examples are just plain not that inspiring without at least four cores in my opinion. 

I’m giving the keynote at the Fox Valley Day of .NET next month, but they had some extra session slots.  It looks like my talk on the Parallel Extensions to .NET has been accepted for this conference, so me and my new Alienware pal will be there in style crunching data and graphics.

Also, the keyboard glows.

Last night I did my first stop on the Mix it Up! tour: the Indy NDA group in Indianapolis, IN.  These guys have got it made.  They have an absolutely fantastic group of people, a great location, and a TON of swag at every meeting.  I was pleased to be bringing some t-shirts and copies of Expression Studio only to show up abd find 20 books, a webcam, and various other nice prices already on the swag table.

These guys are hard-core too:  Their attendance is 120 people and up for every event, and they hold various SIG groups right after the main user group meeting.  After I did the Mix it up content they invited me into their Architecture SIG meeting to discuss the MVC pattern and we ended up talking about map reduce and the Parallel Extensions for the .net framework.  Thanks, guys, for having me, and maybe I’ll be back again.

I keep meaning to blog about movie nights so people in the area can be informed and so I can keep a history.  Tomorrow’s movie night is King Kong in glorious high definition. 

04.03.2009 8PM – Contact me for details.

Now, bear witness to my poor photography and composition skills and burn the movie night splash logo into your retinas:

I’ve really got to take some better photos.