I have received my signing bonus and have made my big purchase: a new laptop. It is a Compaq Presario V2610CA ( data sheet ) that we bought from FutureShop. Interestingly enough, that same laptop was advertised by two different stores in town, both for the same price, but at one store you had to use mail-in rebates to get the low price. So I was able to buy a very nice laptop and a wireless optical mouse for less than a thousand dollars.

As much as I wanted to get home early today (to play with the new laptop obviously), I had to work late. We had to add a lot of blank tapes to our tape robots to ensure that we would not run out of tapes during the weekend. To add to the fun, someone started a restore and we did not have all of the needed tapes in the robot (our robots are too small to hold all of our tapes). So, since our backup program does not usually use all of the tapes is says it will need, I decided to only put the tapes that were actually needed back in the robot while still trying to put new tapes in our other robot. I did have some moderate success with that method, since I ended up only putting about 20 of the 40 tapes that were supposedly needed. But it took us over 2.5 hours to eject all the tapes, put new tapes in, figure out which tapes were needed for the restore, and make enough room in the robot to hold all of the tapes needed for the restore.

Good night!