Team America, @#% Yeah!

Yeesh it's good to be back this side of yuck. I spent half of Thursday last week all the way up until Saturday night/Sunday morning sick. This was some nasty bug that snuck in from somewhere (where's Homeland Security when you need them?). This terrorist bug envied my freedom and tried taking it by force. I'm happy to say my belief in The American Way brought me through. I didn't end up needing any antibiotics, but I finally understand why the doctor tells you when prescribing antibiotics to stay the course.

So back to my neo-facist life of social irresponsibility.

Almost as soon as I got my confirmation of being hired I went and made a purchase I've been jonesing for a while. I bought myself a real computer. I've been struggling for a while with a Toshiba laptop that works well playing Pong. I had a half-way-decent Dell desktop but I gave it to my nephew Aaron as it seemed he needed it more than I did at the time (Brandy tells me Aaron has a My Space page now so I guess that proves it).

When I bought the laptop - to replace the one that was stolen when our house was broken into on my birthday last year - it seemed pretty spry. In retrospect I guess I would be spry too if all I had to do was display enticing icons for AOL and Yahoo. I took the laptop to the UK and used it to arrange routes on my Garmin Street Pilot and to save digital photos to. It totally smoked at these tasks. Of course neither of these tasks is processor intensive, but what the hay, it convinced me it was all the machine I needed and I magnanimously offered the desktop to Aaron.

And have regretted it almost ever since (Aaron, in case you are reading this, I don't regret giving it to you, I just regretted having given it up).

But now I've got a Velocity machine with Core2 Dynamic Duo whatsis. It's fast and it has Vista (which is cool but requires some changes in how you work), but most importantly, it has a clear Plexiglass side that lets you see the motherboard and cooling fans and wires and drives and there's no dust in there yet! The Velocity company also likes blue neon. The auxiliary video card cooling fans are bathed in blue neon glow; the mouse has neon blue racing stripes; the keyboard keys are lit with blue as well.

I had to go through some major configurations to get my favorite programs to work right. That took almost a week. I got it all figured out and running like a top just about the time the Al Qaeda bug hit me. Good thing I have my own weapon of mass distraction.