When I acquired my laptop, it was dubbed broken, for it was, in fact, broken. The name was appropriate at the time, and since it was canonical*, so I saw no reason to change it, even after the beast was fixed.

Not too long ago, broken gave up the ghost and, once again, became broken. It looks as if the motherboard's power circuit bit the dust, if the scorch marks left by the exploded transistors are any indication. Since most retail channels want anywhere from $300 to $500 for a new board, I have been scouring eBay for a replacement that's of a more reasonable price for a 5-year-old computer. No luck thus far, so for the time being, I am sans laptop. Even though all that really means is that I tend to get bored at work more quickly than I would otherwise, I have grown accustomed to having a laptop and would like to get the damn thing working again. Besides, what kind of computer repair guy would I be if I let an otherwise-perfectly-good system go out in the bin?

I was forced to move the whole operation of this site over to my desktop machine (named reptile, although that may be a temporary thing), making this the first post in a couple years that was typed on a normal keyboard, which is really nothing more than a silly point of interest. In any regard, I just finished setting up Apache and PHP on this box, so I figured I might as well toss a new post up to test things. If you're reading this, everything is working fine.

* All of my electronics that require names have, thus far, been named after Nine Inch Nails songs.

  mood: Good enough
now playing: Tool - 10,000 Days

I haven't really had any kind of desire to talk about the incident on the ides (or much else, really). I suppose it's about time I broke my stony silence, however, so my three readers know what's going on.

Utica has schizoid weather. For about a week in the beginning of March, it was about 60 and fairly sunny. All the snow melted, and it was nice. I like it when it's between 60 and 70. It's pleasant. I was hoping it would stay like that for a while.

But it was not to be.

On wednesday, bloody wednesday, we--with absolutely no warning--had a blizzard of epic proportions and were gifted with about a foot of snow. I looked out the window, said "Aw, hell no!" and planned on staying home. Unfortunately, mum talked me into going to work. So I wiped the foot of snow off my car and was on my way. It was an exceptionally uneventful day. I think two people came in all day, and the phone rang a couple times. I posted something about being in space (which some people apparently found pretty funny (you know who you are)), and I went home. All would have gone wonderfully, had I not been in a three-car accident on the highway on the way home.

Yeah, that's right. First I lost control and hit the guardrail. Not that big of a deal, aside from the fact that my airbags went off and broke the windshield ([again]). Unpleasant, but not catastrophic. I couldn't see anything, due to the fact that my glasses had gone flying from my face. As I was trying to find them, someone else came along and hit the side of my car (tearing a rather large gash in the side of it). A prodigious stream of profanity issued forth.

The standard are-you-okays and should-I-call-the-cops-or-do-you-want-tos ensued, and all seemed to be under control. I was keeping an eye on the oncoming traffic, as I thought it would be a prudent thing to do. Avoiding becoming hamburger (humburger?) is generally a priority. Turns out, it was a prudent thing to do. Another car lost control, as I had, and came hurtling toward me like some kind of angry, red, car-shaped bull on ice. While I was busy running away, but the third car hit my car, which in turn hit the second car. Had I not been paying attention, I would have either been relieved of my legs or thrown into the river that flowed about fifty feet below us. Given the alternatives there, I guess I was lucky, but I still would prefer that none of this had ever happened.

This is exactly how I like to spend my wednesday evenings, let me tell you.

  mood: Bored
now playing: Collide - Monochrome