Amount of sleep I got last night? Very little.

Amount of anxiety I experienced on takeoff? High.

Fortunately the flight was uneventful…but attempts to rent a car were stymied by the fact that I don’t have any real credit cards. I finally had to take a cab to the hotel, which is in a little town called Canton. (Stardock is in a little town a little farther out called Plymouth.) I’ve got my laptop, wireless internet, and WHITE CASTLES for dinner. White Castle doesn’t exist in Texas. We don’t even have Krystals in Texas. So if you want teeny-tiny burgers smothered in pickles and onions and you’re in Texas, you’re pretty much out of luck.

This by itself might be a reason to move to Michigan. Also, the weather is nice, the trees are…trees (as opposed to Texas, where our trees are simply tall bushes) and it’s nice and cool. Yes, I know, that cool is going to turn cold but right now it feels great.

Stardock tomorrow at 1.

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.