I smell a rat. Unfortunately, I don't have a way to kill it. As I've mentioned previously, I have been hunting for an older laptop to use as a word processor. One of my searches yielded a PII with a fair amount of RAM. Just enough to do what I will be demanding of it, but little enough to keep the purchase price low. I put my bid in, with less than an hour to go and was extremely surprised to see it go for a final price of $1,025. Since you can get a fair amount of NEW laptop, with a warra...

One of the things I enjoy about this site is that there are a lot of military personnel and their families who blog here. Being part of the JU community has given me an "inside look" at some of the aspects of this war that the mainstream media will almost certainly never, ever cover. But one of the consequences of that has been certain ill advised, negative posts that quantify someone's service. Specifically, soldiers who like to frag military brass anonymously with their posts because someh...

One of the downsides of my job is that it leads me to have to deal with people asking me to do the impossible, or next to it, with their computers. Now, sometimes I like the challenge, but sometimes you have to know when to say no. This morning yielded one such call. The caller called in asking me to help him configure his router. After some discussion, I discovered it wasn't his router he was actually wanting me to configure, but his wireless network adapter. Well, the official line is that ...

Standing in line at the store today, I saw one of the most ironic coupling of magazine covers on the rack in front of me. They were funny, but in an extremely tragic way. Magazine one was the classic celebrity rag. A spread of Lindsay Lohan's rehab addictions and Nicole Ritchie and Mary Kate looking like walking skeletons, and treating their addictions as if they were something unexplicable. Directly next to it was magazine two. On the cover was an attractive woman, probably about a size 6...

When a white person in America addresses the issue of race, it is virtually certain they will be reminded of our country's history of racism. But while slavery certainly makes up a significant part of our history, it is my contention that the United States of America was ultimately the catalyst for the dismantling of slavery since its very inception, and that the charges levelled against her are revisionist and wrong. You see, if prostitution is regarded, as it so often is, as the world's old...

With Saddam Hussein's body freshly decomposing in the Bagdad soil, I felt it was not to soon to shamelessly capitalize on the death of the Iraqi dictator. And since I could not come up with something original fast enough to beat the OTHER vultures to the corpse (and because it's easier to work with a tune you already know), I reworked Bob Dylan's song "The Hurricane". OK, so it's not perfectly accurate (but neither, frankly, was Dylan's ode), but it's fast, and hopefully will garner me much, muc...

With Saddam Hussein's body freshly decomposing in the Bagdad soil, I felt it was not to soon to shamelessly capitalize on the death of the Iraqi dictator. And since I could not come up with something original fast enough to beat the OTHER vultures to the corpse (and because it's easier to work with a tune you already know), I reworked Bob Dylan's song "The Hurricane". OK, so it's not perfectly accurate (but neither, frankly, was Dylan's ode), but it's fast, and hopefully will garner me much, muc...

So, I'm trolling around on eBay for an older laptop. Ideally, I'm looking for something I can upgrade to Windows 2000 for networking purposes, but really, any Pentium class computer with an OS installed (except for one that has the system requirements for 2K; I have a copy of that I can use) will work. My intentions are to use it almost exclusively as a word processor, so I'm very flexible here. As a result, I was checking out the lower end laptops. Of cours, there are several laptops priced ...

Saddam Hussein is dead. Or, at least that's the official story. And, frankly, it's the story I buy because I see no compelling interest for our government to keep the man alive. As he heads to whatever Valhalla awaits mass murdering evil dictators, bloggers like me who possess more free time and bandwidth than we do wisdom will write on the subject. And in the processing of their thoughts, many of these writers will parade words like "justice" across their blogs, in a sense demanding that the...

So, it's three in the morning here, and even the drunks have turned in for the night. I know because, when they haven't and their computer doesn't work, I'm the first to hear it. I'm like the Maytag repairman, if, say, Maytag was rather buggy and had a tendency to flake out in bad weather. We have only one PC in the queue, and that's probably going to need parts, which aren't available until Monday, and, well, my callbacks aren't likely to appreciate a 3 AM phone call. I have no DVD drive on ...

As I'm working on the TRS-80 case mod, I'm still a bit away from doing the build I want. I have a couple of questions for any veterans that might be patronizing this board. First up is the mini-ITX. I like the possibilities it presents, but the lack of upgradeability, as well as the limited options it presents as far as PCI slots, SATA headers, etc, kind of turns me off. I'm believing I can wedge a microATX in there once I make some standouts and take out a few internal components that get in...

Let me tell you a tale of my hero: Sometime over 100 years ago, in a community in Ohio whose exact location is in dispute (funny story about that...but for another time), a man was born that would silently make his mark on the world, yet no history books would tell his tale. On that night in June, the doctor didn't give much hope for his survival. If he lived through the night, the doctor said, that would in itself be a miracle. The year was 1900, and the young man grew, to set out on his ...

Christmas has for me always been the most bittersweet potion, consisting of memories both pleasant and painful. Unfortunately, every year the ghosts of Christmas past come back to haunt me. I'm going to let them tell you the story of Christmas past. This post may ramble a bit, but read on... One of my bizarre superstitions is that I refuse to watch "Charlie Brown's Christmas". It goes back to one of my earliest conscious memories, from four years old. The only memory I can recall of my parent...

Here's hoping this works... Merry Christmas 2006!