The break room here at work is about eighty degrees. No one knows why. The entire building is air-conditioned, and the rest of the building is around room temperature (like it should be), but for some reason the break room is consistently much hotter, even when no one is in it. It makes me wonder if our real business is refining plutonium in the break room.
The PaperPalm is so cute! I want to get one for my mom. She could tease my dad with it. Her Palm would be faster, more reliable, lighter, less expensive, and easier to use than his. Ha ha.
The power supply in my computer blew a transistor, so I replaced it. Then I realized that the CPU had been fried, so I replaced that. Then I realized that the motherboard was also fried, so I returned the CPU and power supply, and began seeking out a whole new computer.
I bought a “barebones” computer (just a case, power supply, and motherboard) from Fry’s, a big hard drive, and a cheap CPU, and built myself a new computer. The case was really cool, but one of the components on the motherboard (namely the video card) was apparently not compatible with Windows XP, so the computer kept getting “the blue screen of death.” In retrospect, I think the blue screen wasn’t caused by the incompatible video card, but rather by some kind of electrical issue. Still, I wasn’t going to be able to troubleshoot the problem successfully, so I took apart the computer and returned it to Fry’s. Did I mention how much I love Fry’s return policy? Well, I do.
Then I went over to Micro Center to look at prˆt-…-porter computers. One of my big problems with most of the computers out there is that they’re all funky colors, and I want something plain and boring to match my plain and boring monitor, keyboard, and mouse. The computer is a part of my living room furniture—something that guests see as soon as they enter the apartment—so I’m genuinely concerned with its appearance. I want it to blend in, not stand out. Fortunately, Micro Center carries a line of inexpensive, plain, boring computers, so I bought myself one with a Pentium 4 (because I want to support the Blue Man Group) and a really fast CD recorder, plus some extra memory.
When I got home, plugged it in, and turned it on, the internet wasn’t working. Now, I’m not my grandmother, so I didn’t think I had broken the internet, but rather, the computer was obviously unable to connect to my broadband router for some reason. You’re supposed to be able to connect any computer to it, and it has instant access without any configuration. For a day I puzzled over this and feared I’d have to return yet another computer, but fortunately I figured out that the computer just wasn’t getting the right IP address from the broadband router, so once I fixed that, the computer was working perfectly. I installed all my applications and copied my files from my old hard drives, and now I have a computer again.