First blood

First day, first wound. I just finished unpacking my Dell Optiplex GX620 when the GPM walks in and tells me he has a temp laptop for me. Anyone who barely met me knows that mentioning the word "laptop" (or even better, "Toshiba Portege M-series") in my presence causes me to start jerking moves and drool incontrollably.

So I quickly put back the Dell in the box and that's when it happened: the poor desktop was really disappointed to be unpacked for 30 seconds and never been powered up just to be put away like an old shoe; so he fought back and chewed away a sizable chunk of flesh between my left hand thumb and index finger.

The lure of the laptop made me totally oblivious to the searing pain, that being a good thing, because it was really painful. If I had felt anything. Which I didn't.

So yeah, got this laptop/tablet, and went on to order my proper one, a Toshiba M400 with all the toppings. Sadly that will arrive after I leave for Italy, so I just hope nobody else will take it.

Something that I've been warned about, but it didn't actually click until I've experienced it, is the email traffic. By the time I managed to log on to my account for the first time, I had 136 mail waiting for me. @_@

Then I finally understood. There is currently a fairly heated debate between supporters of browser based applications (think Gmail) vs smart client applications (think Outlook). There is absolutely no way in hell you can deal with enterprise-level volume of communication with a browser based application.

No. Fricking. Way.

Sure, browsers have their place to find and read information, but the act of producing information is not something a browser can do. At least when you're talking in high volumes. Even the aggregation process is something that I see more and more delegated to specialized applications; for example, why search using a browser when you could have a client side app that integrates the same web search results plus local results and rich previews and... uhm. I believe my NDA-implants are kicking in right now, I'd better shut up :)

Anyways. One week of crazyhectic ride. And I still have not figured out exactly what am I supposed to DO here or even what my actual position is.

Fun times :)

PS: Sorry for the Seattlelites, but 1.5hrs of commute both ways is not exactly my definition of fun. As soon as I can, I'm moving to the eastside.

5/20/2006 12:00:00 AM