Dell Mini9 Back From the Dead

Dell delivered, as promised, and I now have the new 32GB SSD (Solid State Drive) in my Dell Mini9 netbook. Took all of 5 minutes to replace the drive then booted up the Ubuntu restore disk and had Ubuntu installed about 15 minutes after that. I'm not sure I'm going to reinstall Apple OSX again since Apple removed Atom CPU support in Snow Leopard specifically to block use on the netbooks. It ran well but it was a primarily an experiment on my part just to see how it was done and to see how well it worked. I have absolutely no problem using Ubuntu as it has more than enough functionality for me. A few things missing such as DropBox, PGP and sharing of my iTunes library was really pretty handy. My primary use for this machine is web, SSH and email and for this limited functionality, it works great. Then again, an iPad has the same functionality but also supports DropBox and iTunes. I do have a 32GB, wi-fi only, model ordered just to see how well the iPad works in the University environment. The iPad does not have IPv6 support (which this netbook has) so it wouldn't work at some of the Internet² meetings I attend but, hopefully, IPv6 support may come eventually.

I picked up my old Macbook Pro from my office yesterday as the restore finished. I haven't freed up some additional drive space so the SSD failure could happen again at any time. I think I will move my iTunes and iPhoto libraries off of the internal hard disk which should drop disk utilization below 80GB. This would allow me to install the Intel X25 SSD which should be more reliable than the Super Talent one currently installed. I did receive notice that it's replacement has shipped from China so I may have it sometime next week, about when I plan to start working half time.

On the health front, I went from 12 pain pills per day to 6 and now I'm down to 3. I will drop down to 1 starting tomorrow. Yesterday evening, I attended a 3 hour church meeting just to see how things go having to sit still and I could start feeling it after a couple of hours. No need to rush back into it I guess. Plenty of sick leave available.