In lieu of an actual weekend, I got to be oncall.  Bah.  To back up all the way to Thursday though, I did get to go out that night.  Donette came home from Chicago a day early and we went out on an official “date night” before my lock-down started.  We started our evening with a nice steak dinner at the Oak Room down on the Plaza.  Never been there before, but it was quite a meal.  Can’t beat a well-cooked steak.  After dinner we headed up Broadway a short distance to see Grace Potter at the Uptown Theater.  We’ve seen her a few times before at the Mile High Music Festival in Denver, but haven’t ever caught one of her local shows.  It was a fantastic concert, and the group sounded great in the small venue.  (Quite a bit smaller than the enormous outdoor stage in Denver.)  A bit loud and a bit late for the old folks, but we made it all the way through.  (Well, close anyway;  My ever-present fear of being stuck over 5 minutes in traffic caused us to miss the encore.)

The rest of the weekend was spent (when not on conference calls) installing and testing my new copy of Windows 8.  Oh, the excitement.  I don’t even particularly like Windows, but I do like messing around with new things so I raced right out Friday and grabbed a copy from Microcenter.  I decided to use my laptop as a test platform, as we really don’t use it much anyway and definitely don’t have anything we mind losing on it.  The install went nearly perfect and very quickly. It didn’t auto-detect the video chip, but got everything else.  Given the age of the laptop, I was pretty impressed with that.  The new interface everybody is squawking about is certainly…  “new.”  I haven’t decided if I like it or not yet, I’m still trying to get used to it.  I did install an alternative start menu (pokki) to help me out while I get familiarized with the new setup.  Aside from the rather baffling aesthetic changes, I’m liking the actual functionality.  My creaky old laptop is running very smooth, much better than it ever did on Vista, even when new.  My favorite feature is that when an application is minimized it goes into a sleep mode, using very little resources;  Much different than on Windows 7.  You can check this out in the much-improved Task Manager, it’s pretty slick.  I’ll be testing it out a few more weeks, but I imagine I’ll be putting it on my other machines soon.