Another Blogger Meet-up

We had the March Prescott blogger meet-up today. There was talk last time about finding a bigger place to have it, but we ended up in the same place. There were about the same number of people as last month with some of the regulars missing and their places taken by some new faces. Good food, good conversation, etc.

I realized last night that I let a chance to use my new favorite word slip by on Friday: Friggatriskaidekaphobia. Ah well. There will be other Friday the 13th's.

If anyone needs proof (other than the obvious mathematical one) that half the people are below average, one only need to realize that there are people out there who still give money to Donald Trump. Has anything this buffoon touched ever made money for anyone other than himself?

When an elementary school principle refuses to defend his actions with the words, "Because I don't want to," I think it's pretty safe to assume this guy has been hanging around on the playground too much. This is who we trust to educate the next generation.

Tomorrow, I should be getting a big box with a new PC in it. We splurged with our tax refund money and picked up a new quad-core system. The only bad part is that it comes with Vista. I swore after Win2K to never own another MS OS. Then we had to get an XP laptop when we moved out here so Debbie could work as an outside agent for her old employer. We've been limping along with that until now, but with only one gig of RAM, it chokes when playing HD content full-screen, and it can't make use of the 1920x1080 resolution of our TV/computer screen. I had thought about one of the Linux variants, but there is just too much screwing around that you have to do to get the thing to do what we want it to do. I've lusted after Apple hardware since the days of Lisa, but Apple has always charged a high premium for their hardware. That changed for a short period when they made the switch from Motorola to Intel chips, but it didn't last. A Mac Mini would have carried a 50% premium for the same hardware in our current, two-year-old laptop. Add to that the extra cost of repurchasing all the software we have on our PC, and the hassle of file conversions (not a lot as I try to stay cross-platform whenever possible, but not zero) and it was just not going to happen. So we stick with Windows for now. I configured the system for Win7 (as much as possible) which sounds pretty good so far. It usually takes Microsoft three tries to get something right, so Win7 may be around for a while and Vista will quickly fade like ME did.

I also went through the usual buy vs. build question. It used to be that building a system let you come in cheaper and with better componants, but when I priced it out, building came in at a premium. It will be interesting to crack open the case when it arrives and see what's inside. I suspect a lot of no-name componants. I know the motherboard is Intel and the video card is one of the higher-end ATI cards, but other than that, nothing is specified by brand. But our financial situation didn't really leave me with much of a choice, and we don't have anything around here like a Fry's Electronics where I could grab the stuff I needed; everything would have been mail-order.

Anyway, next week will be devoted to getting the new system set up with all our software and everything working nicely. I need everything ship-shape before classes kick in on March 24th. Then I won't have time for anything until I'm all done on May 11.

Well, I'm going on a quest for food and maybe some TV on Hulu.