Alas, my laptop, alas alas!

Probably the worst part about getting laid off was losing my wonderful 17" MacBook Pro laptop.  It was like losing an appendage.  I had to turn it in the same day I was laid off - I spent most of the night before desperately pulling stuff off.  To be expected, I missed some very important files.  Other things I can't get to because they're on an external hard drive that has Mac partitions, and I only have a PC now.  Argh.

I asked the person who gave me the "package" if I could buy it from Sun.  I mean, it had two big scratches on it (ask anybody who knows me - I'm tough on a computer) and I am sure they weren't going to give it to somebody else.  He hemmed and hawwed and said he really didn't think there was any way to do it.  Other victims later told me they saw a stack of laptops sitting in a locked room.

What a waste.  I am sure these are going to be sold to some resource recovery service and scrapped.  I even upgraded it to a 7200 RPM disk.  And this from a company that claims to be "green."  Humph.

So now I'm working on my wife's computer, getting used to XP again.  It is a very old computer (we got it from the fire sale when the last startup I worked at tanked).  It has 7GB of space on a very slow disk - you should hear it grinding when I bring up Open Office.  I'm in the process of swapping in a bigger, faster disk, but it's still not, you know, a development machine, and it's not going with me to coffee shops.

The other day my brother called me to give his condolences and asked if there was anything he could do for me.  As a joke I said "well, you could get me a laptop".  Ha ha.  And then he floored me by saying "well, actually, I have one!  I just bought a new MacBook and I have my old one sitting  here.  I was wondering what to do with it.  It's an Intel chip, and I upgraded both the disk and memory.  It's yours."  Wow! 

Thanks, bro!