those of you on the mailing list will know why this sermon is late. those who only stop by the page to read (does any such creature still exist?) will feel jealous & excluded, which might inspire them to buck up & join the list.

yes, i have a brand new computer! after settling all the debts that were thrust upon me by former friends, the money started to pile up in my account. i'd had my eye on certain new toys which would be expensive or awkward to add to my compaq (which you might recall i bought as an open item, sight unseen at best buy when the machine from school collapsed on me). the obvious answer was to get a whole new system. i'd never have this kind of money again.

so i went total hardware geek & had a local joint custom build me a computer with the precise parts i picked. i chose every chipset, every peripheral, every peck of pickled peppers in this baby from their catalog. for some parts, like the motherboard, i plunged to the mind-numbing depths of research to be sure i chose the right part. other times i just picked one that looked good (like i picked their most expensive sound card).

the result is 800 mhz of athlon thunderbird fury, with 128mb of sdram under the hood, a 7-bay atx chassis, 60gb hdd, & a lovely 17" view, as well as a bunch of other letters: cdrw, dvd, spdif, agp4x... plus i got an amazing new lexmark inkjet that prints affordably at 2400x1200. there's only one word to describe how good the cd covers i print out look: purty.

do i like it? absolutely, when i get to play with it. i've had to spend way too much time troubleshooting the old computers, & their migrations. first i had to move all my files onto the new machine, which required hooking them up via the parallel port. windows's built-in direct cable connection feature was extremely to use! that is, AftER you spend an hour changing all your port settings, & If you were lucky enough to find the correct cable in the store, hidden among thousands of similar-looking but totally incompatible printer & switchbox cables.

i literally could not find the right cable at best buy, & ended up feeling lucky because i'd found a cable which conceivably could be the right one (it wasn't, but at least had the corrector on both ends, the only one i saw that did). luckily officemax had 2 copies of one model of one brand that would work, so our files got moved. then i gave my old machine to my parents, but mom couldn't live with the internet connection problems that had been plaguing me for so many months. so just tonight, i spent 2 1/2 hours troubleshooting it, & think i might have finally fixed it. or maybe i got lucky. in troubleshooting it can be hard to tell the difference.

or in other words, i've been working my ass off & haven't had any time to play tonight! so i'm going to wrap up this poor excuse for a sermon & go play me a round of sid meier's alpha centauri... an exciting sequel to civilization (even if it doesn't carry the civ name, it's far superior to that civ call to power bollocks). or maybe i'll burn some cds. or maybe i'll do both!