And things were never the same ;)… OK, so we made it without problems. 4.5 hours flight to Montreal – here’s all I’ve seen of Montreal so far:

Mare of course has seen more, being born there, but we won’t hold it against her.

Got to DC via a shuttle flight, took about 90 minutes. After about a 40 minutes Super Shuttle ride (I think I’m going to call it Super Shuffle, the guy was asleep when we got to the van and I think he stayed that way during the drive) we arrived at the Hilton Washington. Crappy weather here today, unfortunately, so we may not sightsee too much today. But here is the (wet) view from our hotel room so far:

More blogs to come… we’re awaiting the arrival of Jeff to see what’s up for the rest of the weekend. The plan is Smithsonian(s) tomorrow and see how the day goes as far as monument visits, etc. We’ll keep you posted!

Mare and I are heading out to Washington DC for a few days (Apr 7-12) . Conference for her, sightseeing and R&R for me…we hope to see the major sights, maybe the Pentagon, Arlington Cemetery as well. On the red-eye flight tonight, via Montreal, hope to be settled in by Saturday afternoon DC-time. I’ll keep y’all posted via blogs – pics too !

OK so believe it or not, I have bought a Powerbook. It’s a great little unit and of course is nowhere near Microsoft-land. I have to say I’m impressed so far. The battery life is amazing (usually between 4 and 5 hours with WiFi ON!) and the O/S works like a charm. Granted in Windows I would be under the hood doing all kinds of things, and 4000 applications would be installed to mess up the works. For the Mac, I haven’t installed much (ironically enough, the first thing I installed was the Remote Desktop Connection client from Microsoft) but so far it’s been pretty painless.

I thankfully do know a bit about Unix/Linux as far as the commands to move around in the console, edit, copy, change permissions etc. This helps for a few things, like editing the local HOSTS file to allow me to get at my web servers from inside my LAN. It’ll be a learning process though, and one that I greatly look forward to.

One thing that stands out, and it’s such a small thing, is that I can create Profiles for my network card configuration. Doesn’t sound like much, maybe, but when you go from place to place like I do it’s nice to be able to say “I’m at blah blah” and things like Static IPs and preferred wireless networks are set up for me. It’s a major pain to have to switch from DHCP to Static when you go to various places that might not offer one or the other.

I also like the IM client John recommended – Adium X. This is a multi-provider client that will even let you have multiple accounts from the same provider running at the same time. So I could have 2 MSN Messenger accounts going (and I actually do have 2) along with many others, even Google Talk.

This Powerbook has Bluetooth and WiFi built-in, as well as a Superdrive (what Apple calls a DVD Burner) and a fairly decent graphics card. The Bluetooth is going to be fun to play with, and I’ve already hooked up my cell phone.

So for all of you that know me, the earth has shifted on its axis, hell has indeed frozen over and Peter has crossed over to Macland.