Feeling much better today, almost healthy. Kinda bored, though: with my trip to Seattle and another weekend, I will be all ready to start the new job and get busy.

I bought a new toy today: a used IBM Thinkpad T23. It's indescribably faster than my old Thinkpad, a 1.13GHz Pentium-III vs. a 366MHz Pentium-II. I loaded Ubuntu Linux onto it; I'm still getting some of the kinks out, and it'll be a little while before it's ready for me to use full-time. I was impressed, though: these guys delivered it to my house an hour or so after I called them, overall making it from beginning to end the fastest I've ever blown that much money.

My beard is getting more and more grizzled every month. As recently as six months ago, it had to grow out quite a bit before it really got into crazy colors of red and white and grey and sand and light brown and dark brown; now it's pretty much like that all the time. The girl loves it, but at some point I may consider dyeing it out of vanity, especially if I get tired of people acting like I'm in my mid- to late thirties.