Had a very nice holiday weekend… the quick synopsis:
– Spent 12/23 at the Behling’s house in S. MKE w/ the Bock family. Good times. Quote of the evening for me was from me, on my cousin Aaron and his current physique– “Yeah, last year you were thin. This year, you look like you could kick somebody’s ass.”
– 12/24 we were at Grandma Markowski’s house. We had a delightfully filling meal (per usual), and made use of the Polish-basement-bar to an unprecedented extent. I laughed the hardest when Grandma opened her first gift– a book, titled “50 Uses for Your Cat”
– Didn’t get to sleep @ Michelle’s house until about 4AM on the 25th, and after that, slept in for a good portion of 12/25. Had more gift-exhangey excitement w/ her fam. I got back to Vegas around 7:30.

Anyway, during the course of the weekend, I had a few occasions to surf a little on the internets and mess around w/ my laptop, and I noticed that the boot-up time is POSITIVELY EXCRUCIATING. I’ve defragged and refragged and uninstalled this and reinstalled that, and I just wasn’t satisfied. I do have a theme-mod packager sitting on top of Windows, but in and of itself, this software doesn’t really eat resources. I came to the conclusion that what really needed to go was some of the installed shite that I never use, and as much of the proprietary bloatware that I could get rid of.

The nice thing about de-bloatifying your system is that, even if it doesn’t result in a marked increase in performance, you probably didn’t need that disk-sucking mess on there anyway. So, everybody wins. The first two items I removed (links point to the alternatives):
– Adobe Reader
– QuickTime

In the past, what with owning a Stinkpad, I’ve kept the IBM tools (many of which *are* useful) up-to-date as well. But, I notice that there are a number of Thinky-processes that kick in at startup, and maybe I don’t need all of ’em. I’ll probably trim some fat in that region next…

If you’re at work– try to stay awake, and if you’re at home– put some pants on for chrissakes!!