Oh, They’re So Cute!

Well, it’s been a busy few days. We had a couple of new arrivals this past weekend and they have been keeping me pretty busy. Yup, you guessed it. On Saturday we were blessed with the coming of two happy and smiling…laptop computers! OK, I realize to most of you this is ho-hum, but to a geek like me, it’s major.

I had been struggling for most of this year to come up with a way to replace my aged PDA. It has an internal battery that isn’t the easiest thing to replace…in fact, trying to has a fair likelihood of me damaging something beyond repair. I’d thought about smart phones and newer PDAs, but none of them were going to do what I wanted. You see, as a writer, when I’m away from my home base, I’d like to be able to–you know–write. With my PDA I can do that easily since I have this snappy little fold-up keyboard.

The the arrival of the new Netbooks (or Ultra-low cost PCs), I thought I might have found my solution. Thing is, they cost almost as much as a low-end laptop. More than cost, though, the small keyboards and the lack of a track record with these machines gave me pause. So I took the coward’s way out and decided to get a low-cost laptop.

In the end, I bought two HP Pavilion DV6809 computers. Why two? I’d been planning to buy a laptop for general home use (especially the budget) at some point this year, and since I was getting one, I decided to kill two birds with one stone. Anyhoo…for the past several days I’ve been busy installing and configuring and all that other fun stuff. Perhaps the most time-consuming thing after getting the network to place nice between the various OSs was moving my XAMPP installation and my personal wikis onto a UFD (a/k/a a ThumbDrive). I can’t depend on always having network access, so the only sane approach to have these oft-needed writing references available is to put them onto a portable format so that they are always available–unless I forget and leave the UFD at home.

The excitement of new installations is almost done. The hard work is done. Though I’ve have a few very frustrating moments, it was nice to exercise my inner nerd. Since I don’t really work much on computers that don’t happen to be here, that side of me hasn’t gotten out too often. Maybe I should start learning a new programming language. Maybe that would help. Python. Maybe I’ll learn Python. (Just so you know, the lack of working on computers isn’t due to lack of opportunity, but simply the fact that I’ve done it for almost all of my adult life, and I’m a little bit tired of loaning myself out for that.)

My computer has at least finished its first task. I wrote a quick 5,600-word piece on how to fix our education system. You can read about it at http://hubpages.com/hub/Fixingthe-Education-System. It’s funny…back in college I would have thought something like this was hard, if only for the length. Now, not so much (obviously, since I do it for fun).