In about three hours I’ll be at the airport. In about five my flight leaves. In about eight I’ll be in Michigan.

It is going to be hard keeping my inner fanboy in check. If I’m not careful I’ll end up giggling excitedly the whole time I’m at Stardock.

Updates will follow, mostly posted from my brand new netbook. I had several people tell me, “Just try it, you’ll get used to it” and when I found out that there were some netbook models that were slightly larger than the typical ten inches I decided to go for it.

So I ended up with a Gateway LT31, which I’d never heard of until I saw it at Best Buy. To my surprise, it had almost everything I was looking for. The screen is 11.6 inches at 1366×768, and while it’s widescreen I’m not having that much trouble reading it. The keys on the keyboard are nice and big, it’s got a 250-gig hard drive, an AMD processor, two gigs of RAM out of the box and a dedicated Radeon graphics chip instead of the awful Intel 950 integrated graphics most models of this type are stuck with. And the price was $379.

Cons? It came with Vista, which I had to scrub and replace with XP. And the AMD processor and graphics processor suck up a lot more power than your average netbook, so the battery life is only about five and a half hours…which, goshwow, is more than enough for me.

Visual Studio Express installed just fine and Planitia compiled cleanly (though it runs a little slow, surprise surprise). Warcraft III runs just fine, but I haven’t had a chance to put it to the WoW test…that game takes a long time to download, dontcha know.