Well, I came in early today to have my directed studies class with a student from Belgium. I guess one of these days I’ll get into what a mess all that was, but I’ve got far too much of a headache at the moment to care. Instead, I’m far more interested in the fact that I’ve finally gotten around to configuring the new laptop computer they gave me here at the office. It’s a Lenovo Thinkpad or whatever, and they gave me a monitor (whose base is broken and therefore won’t stand up), keyboard (the giant-ass monster that can be used as a battering ram), a mouse (fugly) and a docking bay. It’s the dock that has made me decide that I am going to call this computer “Bateau.” It just means “boat” in French, but it follows my naming scheme for computers. (That being that I name all computers starting with the letter B.) So Bateau is up on the network (I’m so retarded for not doing it sooner) and I’ve changed the color scheme from Windows nastiness to a more basic blue and green scheme.

Probably the most interesting thing (or what I find to be fascinating) is that it has a fingerprint scanner. Rather than type in a password and diddle with all that, I just run my finger over this little scanner on the lower right of the keyboard and it logs me in for me. Bizarre, huh? I’ve never had a computer with a fingerprint scanner. Of course, technically I’ve never had a computer with a docking bay either, but that’s not nearly as fascinating.

So now that I’ve got this machine up and running, I may actually start checking my e-mail on a more regular basis. I may even get more work done. Heck, I might even start enjoying work again for a while. Who knows? All I know is that now I’m plenty distracted by Bateau and probably won’t get as much grading done as I ought to. I figure I’ll spend about the next hour getting Bateau situated on my desk until students start coming in. Yippeeeeee. Playing with new gadgets is fun.