Lately my days have been spent doing homework or just wasting time on the web. Anyone who knows my normal schedule can guess what I’ve been doing - it basically consists of school-filled days and various fun activities at night. I took a day in-house Tuesday in order to get some work done and also a bit more sleep than I normally get. I only missed one class, and since I had it again today, I know I didn’t miss much (or the professor was just being nice, as 2 of 6 were gone).

Spring Break is just around the corner - I have one more class to teach this evening (7pm-9pm) and then a class tomorrow, and then a week off from the daily grind. Unfortunately, I’m not doing anything special this year for break, just plan to hang around and do some homework and research, and get caught up on various projects (like updating my Debian packages). With luck, I may actually get some leisure programming done as well.

In other news, I want this iBook (edit okay that link didn’t work. It’s the 12” model of a normal iBook) badly for some reason. It could be that I’m spending more time away from my apartment, or the fact that lots of my colleagues tend to have laptops nowadays. I’ve wanted an iBook for a while now, but the desire to buy has increased lately. The fact that I can get an instant loan and pay $43 a month for it makes it just that much more attractive.

There is only one thing really keeping me from buying it right now - I’m not sure if I’d really be comfortable with it. It would be my first non-PC computer, and while I’m sure I can get it to mesh correctly with my other computers (which are mostly linux), I’m not sure how well I would work on it. I am a big fan of the iLife products – I’ve been looking for a calendar-type application to keep track of where I need to be for a while now, and iCal looks like a winner to me. I wonder if there is a rental place out there that I could get the same model for a week or so and play with it, see if I could get used to using the laptop for the tasks I want to use it for. Ideally, it would be installed as it comes from Apple, but I suppose I could handle reinstalling the system (I will probably try to get Debian on it anyway if I buy it).

I’ve had some other ideas bouncing around in my head, but this was the first thing that came to mind. Any comments from people who have iBooks or other laptops and could share their experiences? Maybe you know of a rental place?