Yours truly has acquired a new “Christmas” laptop. This isn’t the perfect choice. The ideal solution would be to run my old laptop for fifty years, until such time as its repeatedly repaired and rebuilt chassis dissolves into rust just as the aliens and zombies swarm my compound on Mars and I deploy my EMP Pulse weapon that fries anything more advanced than a toaster; thus hailing the beginning of a new era where the highest technology is the moldboard plow. Unfortunately, I live in reality. I don’t have time for Quixotic challenges and lack a Martian outpost.
My old laptop, despite being only four years old, was exhibiting every trait of planned obsolescence. It was running exclusively on external drives, failing to boot with alarming regularity, and had a battery life of zero. It has been begging for a graceful retirement for three months. I granted it. This is the sane solution.
The timing is problematic. Normally I’d run from any purchase around Christmas. Some paint huffing yahoo is going to see that I spent money in December and use it to justify ever earlier Christmas commercialism. Sorry folks, when you see Christmas advertisements during the Superbowl, my new laptop contributed to it.
My idea was to replace the decrepit beast I’ve been using and tinker with its replacement over the Holiday. Ideally I’ll have the shiny new setup running in time for my 2015 New Year’s Resolution to “get my electronic shit together”. So far, no dice.
Like the early Fords which “come in any color you want so long as it’s black”, the laptops in my price range come with “Windows installed good and hard“. The Curmudgeonly side of my brain is cursing the insanity of it all. The Adaptive side chose to adapt by thinking of something better to do… which is anything.
So until such time as I get this high tech nightmare running a proper OS you won’t be hearing much from me. I can login to WordPress in Win 8.1 but by the time I’ve run the gauntlet of Microsoft’s BS I don’t feel like writing. See? Bill Gates hates my blog.
The blog may be on it’s own for a while. How long? It might be hours, it might be days, who knows? All I can say is that I got liquor for Christmas and sitting around the fire doing nothing is mighty attractive. Merry Christmas y’all.