Rank Materialism

Freedom. I am now the proud new owner of a Gateway 6020GZ laptop, perfect for students and others with limited means. I can now go into a Starbucks or a Barnes & Noble and look like I'm doing something important. Though in practice thus far it has allowed me to surf and blog from my living room as opposed to being limited to the kichen, where the desktop and its associated infrastructure have taken over, rather like a factory in a one-company town.

The desktop, the other day, greeted me with padlocks and chains around its gates, without so much as two weeks notice. How would this community survive? It wouldn't boot up. All I got was that strobing wait as we access the hard drive screen, which in this particular desktop's case is a really cool x-wing fighter blasting away at an evilly-designed TIE fighter. (The computer is where my inner geek roams free.) Anyway, that screen isn't so cool when it stays up for 15 or 30 minutes.

So I hied myself down to Best Buy, which I don't particularly like but what are you gonna do? I was going for another desktop, but this laptop (or are we supposed to say "notebook" now?) caught my eye. Screen very shiny. The (slightly) more rational part of my brain was also impressed by the price, which was quite competitive with your standard tower. So what the hell. I bought the thing.

Soon after ripping it out of the box and getting it signed up on the home wireless network, which I acquired earlier solely for the purpose of allowing Tivo to communicate with its mothership without a landline, I noticed that the desktop concern had ended its lockout and was now open for business. What the hell? I guess it was a contract renegotiation gambit which failed. The town's future is assured! But for how long? Actually I suspect that there are some sort of bugs in there- literal ones- messing around with things about which they have no understanding, much like Walter Pidgeon and Leslie Nielsen wandering around the Krell super-computer in Forbidden Planet.

Diversification is the key to any community's future, so the laptop is staying. That'll make the desktop think twice before it tries that trick again. All power to the workers!

This event also made me realize the woefully inadequate job I've been doing backing up all my various and precious data. Pictures, gone! Passwords to every site I've ever visited, gone! Back-up for this blog, gone! Since I've been granted a reprieve I better get started backing up all that data. I'll start sometime next week. I don't feel like doing it right now.