This morning, after leaving the previous entry, I dropped the cat off at the shelter. It seemed like a cool place, and apparently Route501 goes right between there and someplace near my home. I got some information on it -- I may volunteer there once or twice a week. On the way back, I naturally got badly lost and went through the grand entrance/egress to Pittsburgh and then got stuck in traffic on the surface streets downtown. When I made it to work, my new laptop was waiting for me, which is a good thing.

Initial impressions for my dv8000z:

• Booting it up in windows to get a hardware inventory, its intro thing was extremely loud, and the mute and volume keyboard buttons were helpfully disabled in order to insure maximum irritation. My officemate tactfully chose to take a smoke break when it got too irritating
• To make this worse, the speakers are nice and can put out some decent sound. However, this is also a plus once one gets out of the Windows intro
• The keyboard will take some getting used to. It's good though -- it's much closer to being a full keyboard than anything I've had on a laptop before
• Display quality is good
• It's lighter and a bit smaller than my work laptop (Dell Inspiron 8500)
• The CF card slot will be useful if it'll work under Linux
• The power connector is on the rear side instead of the back. I'm not sure if this is a plus or a minus
• I didn't need to peel off the Intel sticker, because it's AMD64. I still had to peel off the Windows sticker.
• The touchpad is off to the left. This isn't too bad for me because I'm a lefty

That's all, for now. I haven't used it much yet because I'm still waiting for my AMD64 Fedora Core 4 DVDISO to download. Suddenly I'm moving from not being able to burn DVDs on anything apart from my VCR/DVD recorder to installing Linux off of a DVD I burned myself. More news to come after I get it installed.