How the hell did I manage that?
So anyway, being 10AM Tuesday morning, and a talk to give at 1:30PM - I cruised down to Myer (by way of a $6 taxi, didn't realise how close it was) and bought an Asus EeePC.
I then rewrote the talk in <2 hours and did it. It was a bit of a rush job but it worked OK.
I'm fairly impressed by the EeePC.. it's got 4G flash, 512MB ram, Webcam.. and comes with a pre-installed and customized Xandros-based OS. It has all the good utils.. Pidgin, Firefox, Skype, Openoffice, etc... although I hope to install Ubuntu on it later.
It did manage to compile a kernel in <hour earlier.. so its not *that* slow.. altho the kernel was a little minimalistic with the features needed for it.