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I had planned to attend a “tour” of Sun’s new Black Box, a data center contained inside of an ISO-standard shipping container. Unfortunately, the friend I was going to attend with had a semi-last minute conflict and couldn’t go, and since I’m not necessarily in the market for a self-contained shipping container cum data center, I bailed out. I’ll have to find another event where I can drink wine and listen to propaganda…

In other non-sequitur news, I got tired of trying to match firmware versions of drivers for my Latitude d600’s Dell Truemobile 1450 wireless card with the cadre of available driver versions out there, so I decided that the laptop was getting Windows reinstalled on it. I want something that I can actually *use* when I travel, instead of being forced to spend the entire time trying to figure out how to get a Linux installation to talk to a crappy hotel Internet connection. Heresy, I know.

But wait, there’s more! I also decided, as an experiment, to *not* reinstall Firefox on the laptop, but to instead use Internet Explorer 7 as my primary browser on that machine. The only factor that really made that an option was Google’s latest toolbar release, which now offers a very easy way to sync your bookmarks up to the Googletrix and have them available in every other browser you have that’s running the toolbar. We’ll see how this experiment goes…there are definitely some things that don’t work well in IE 7, but so far nothing that’s a show-stopper.

RIP, Sitebar. You were awesome when I needed you, but now I’ve turned another little bit of my soul over to Google.