I am not quite done with my first year of residency, but I can honestly say that it has been one of the hardest years of my life for me and my family. I can look at my kids and recognize that they have grown and matured, but the actual time encompassing this year feels like one big blur. It is a feeling that is hard to describe with words. Between work and family there is precious little time for sleep and even less for research or programming. I had hoped to continue projects from my PhD work, but progress has severely slowed to a proverbial crawl. I did read one book on Clojure ( The Joy of Clojure ) and I am still enamored with the concept of the language even though I have yet to implement anything in it. I am much more comfortable using Perl and R, but I know that I need to implement projects in Clojure to really learn the language. Time will tell whether I can ever take the next step. I hope so.

I continue to love my little netbook, the Acer Aspire One 722. I upgraded to Lubuntu 12.04 from 11.10 with zero problems. I am using the 64bit version of Lubuntu that seems to run fine even on the lowly AMD C-60 processor. I have approximately 5 hours of battery time. How did I ever do with less? I use the Citrix client within Lubuntu to connect with the servers at work with no issues. It works as well or better than the dedicated wired machines running windows. The wireless connection from within Linux seems much more robust than the wireless connection from within Windows 7 even though it obviously uses the same hardware. The only application that I find in Windows that is lacking in Lubuntu/Linux is Speech Recognition that comes standard in Windows 7. Although not quite up to the standards as provided by Dragon, Microsoft's Speech Recognition is fairly powerful. I have been able to train it to recognize a considerable amount of medical vocabulary as well. I sometimes wonder what Microsoft could do with their existing technology if they had decent management.

I am going to try a new distribution of Linux. I bought a netbook to carry around the clinic and on the floors. I wanted a netbook with more than 4 hours of battery time, with an 11 inch screen, and with a weight of about 3 lbs. I did not want to spend more than $300. My "perfect" work netbook turned out to be an Acer Aspire One 722 with an AMD Dual-Core C-60 Processor. Inexpensive enough that if something happens I will not be crushed and fast enough not to kill me on a daily basis. The keyboard is the only thing right out of the box that I am not thrilled with. The biggest surprise was working on a nearly silent computer. Amazing! After too many years to count, for this netbook I am switching from Mandriva to Lubuntu. I could only find my 1 gig old crucial USB stick when I was trying out new live distributions. Lubuntu fit on the stick and booted with wireless access up and running. I only need to get audio working. I have not given up completely on Mandriva. I always liked Mandriva for its well thought out installations and support for many different desktops. Before I ran Openbox, I used to run Blackbox and Fluxbox on my old pentium before I upgraded it to a lightning fast 400Mhz AMD K6-III. I have been running Mandriva for a long time. But, it looks like many of their developers left forming mageia and Mandriva will only fully support KDE with their upcoming releases. My only disappointment with Lubuntu (ubuntu) so far is the default decision to ship it with a firewall initially disabled. This seems ridiculous to me. So far I am really impressed with the little AMD C-60 processor. It does everything I need to do including Perl and R scripting. I still need to get Clojure and ClojureScript installed :)