A New Zealander sent me this: http://www.abc.net.au/tv/gruentransfer/thepitch.htm. They are two advertisement which are selling the idea of invading New Zealand.

I should note that the ABC is the Australia Broadcasting Corporation (the Government funded media organization).

It's cheeky - but it makes you think. Should all wars be 'sold'? Oh that's right: wars have always been sold since the dawn of time.

I got my new workstation today. Dell T3400 (which appears to be the standard workhorse in our team) and a Samsung 245BW display (24" Widescreen at 1920x1200 native). I tried running the display in portrait mode (good for reading code) but it was so long my neck had to move to scan the entire screen. In it's landscape configuration the monitor is almost as wide as my desk (thanks to a rather 'snuggly' office sharing arrangement).

When installing all the drivers I discovered an interesting fact about the Dell: it has an NVIDIA 8800 GTS graphics card which "feature a powerful unified architecture that delivers an incredibly true-to-life gaming experience. Power through games at record speeds". I'm not exactly sure what kind of gaming I'm supposed to be doing at work - but hey - it runs Windows Classic Mode on Windows Server 2008 like a dream!

As a side note I switched my Lenovo T60p over to Windows Server 2008 64-bit and it's running like a dream (much better drivers are out now since I tried 64-bit last). One piece of advice: if you install Hyper-V the 'Sleep' function of your machine won't work (thanks to Michael Lu who passed on that very useful info).