As you might have noticed, gentle readers, I have not posted in a while. I spent a luxurious weekend in my favorite travel destination, Milwaukee, Wisconsin. I celebrated my birthday by helping yet another friend move. It’s not that I have a lot of friends in Wisconsin, it’s that they move around frequently.
It wasn’t all hard work; I got to spend a couple nights at the beautiful Hyatt Regency, enjoying the skyline from the 17th floor because I specifically requested a low floor. I felt somewhat cosmopolitan in my hotel room, with my laptop, writing blog entries and whatnot. The Hyatt offers wireless Internet access in all of its rooms now, a plastic placard let me know. Swell. So how come you’re getting this dump now, instead of as it happened on Friday and Saturday?
Because my laptop is an IBM ThinkPad. You know how new ThinkPads have numbers after them? My laptop does not; it’s an original ThinkPad. Its carbon-dating establishes its origin circa 1993. It runs Windows 3.11, but it has almost 20 Mb free on the hard drive of the original 40.
I fail as a TruGeek(tm) because I don’t need the latest in equipment. After I reset the date and time (or not) to workaround a dead CMOS, I can type text into my laptop’s Wordpad using a microscopic keyboard. That’s why I bring the laptop around, in case I get inspired to start on yet another unfinished but promising novel concept. It’s a typewriter in which I can cut and paste, and from which I can import the result into a real word processor on my main PC through the world’s last 3.5″ floppy disk. Plus, it can play one or two really slick games I downloaded from BBSes while I was in college.
I don’t need a tablet PC or a new AMD 2000+ laptop with 20″ screen. I paid an extra $40 in 1997 for a used notebook with a color monitor, for crying out loud. I don’t have a Personal Data Assistant, and I don’t even use the free magazine giveaway electronic addressbook to organize the dozen phone numbers of my friends or the two dozen names on my Christmas card list. iPods? I can whistle off-key for free, you damn kids!
So, did you miss me? Is that why you’re reloading?
