Well, folks, my home system WorldWatch One is officially dead. Apparently the power supply fan quit working, which made it overheat and caused a power surge that fried everything on down the line.

*sigh*

So I brought it home and now it sits dead in the living room. The guys at the repair shop (Affordable Computers) were nice enough to give me a $50 discount good for the next week if I wanted to get one of their refurbished machines. They have a nice selection of refurb laptops. I am sorely tempted, since they have a 1.8 ghz Dell that I could get for $600. I like having two systems, one for 'Net and one for writing.

But in somewhat happier news, I brought the Compaq in here prepared to do battle with the DSL installation wizard CD, but just on the off chance I tried plugging in the Ethernet cable to the modem without it. Yahoo came right up, no prep neccessary. After a moment of stunned awe I hit Outlook to see if it would get my e-mail -- which it did after a five-minute search on Bellsouth's online help to get the POP3 and SMTP server names to tell it where to look. Then it slurped in 123 e-mails. I am in awe. Blinkz in astonishment. And all I had to do was plug in the nice blue cable.

So I am considerably heartened by that. Like everything else, this machine is simply amazing.

I could buy that Dell 1.8 gig. I suspect it would only need similar configuration. I get paid again before LibertyCon. I could do it.

Laptop Addiction. Where's the grant money? Where's the ad campaign?

Damn that genetic imperative to buy consumer electronics!