Tuesday 12th August 2008: 11.08pm. It's taken a while, but I have finally transferred most of my day to day work stuff like email to my mini-laptop as I prepare for moving back to Ireland. It's an excellent wee laptop, everything I always wanted one to be: light as a feather, quiet, small, cool (doesn't burn you) and powerful enough to not be annoyingly slow. In fact editing this page in Microsoft Expression is the very first time its speed has been a problem as there is a definite lag between me typing and it drawing it on the screen - but at least it is keeping up, and it is after all my own fault for having such a ginormous page!
I have tried editing my book in Microsoft Word 2007 on this laptop and it will, just about, fit two of its pages on screen readably at once. I wouldn't type into that for extended periods, but it's good enough for getting a sense of layout. It's surprising what a 1024x600 screen can actually do - it's tiny compared to my 24" 1920x1200 screen above (that can fit eight pages without breaking a sweat but I normally type into six pages onscreen at once) but obviously enough this mini laptop is rather more portable. I also have Mac OS X installed onto it which runs an absolute treat though it was a royal pain in the ass to install because I had to clone the hacked Mac install disc onto a USB flash disc and boot off that - the mini laptop, obviously enough, has no optical drive. So all in all, I am very pleased with it - upon my recommendations, my sister has bought one too for college. Unlike most mini-laptops, this MSI model has a very decent keyboard - I type quickly enough, and even the reduced width punctuation keys haven't caused me issue.
UCC finally accepted me yesterday which is really about time: I am now doing a Masters in Business Information Systems. Who knows what might come thereafter, just the next few months are still very opaque most especially with how much money we'll have spare after buying (hopefully) a car and running it for as long as the money lasts, and hopefully get a job before impending doom! I think I have everything on track for our move to Ireland even though we don't pack for another eleven days - can't think of anything else I can do as sooner than is possible. The book currently stands at nine chapters in varying degrees of readability, spanning some 220 pages and nearly 90,000 words which isn't at all bad for two months of writing from what I understand - though of course it won't be finished by the end of August, though before classes start is still doable. We'll see. Anyway, be happy!
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