The IT guy feels pretty sure that Mindy is fine but for needing a new harddrive. Not only that, but he thinks he has one that should work in her and, if so, will sell it to me for what he paid for it. So Mindy might live again, sometime this week maybe, and I can get back to semi-normal.

But wait: there’s more!

The Abyss has a new door. No longer will I be tempted to get a round frame for the hole and call it a port-hole. Granted, the new door is unfinished (not laquered, etc.) but I suppose that doesn’t matter so much.

And that’s all I’ve got. I worked on the Barony site a bit and managed to come up with the WORST ever color configuration for a forum… but at least I know what I did wrong and can fix it lol My goal is to be able to say, look, a forum, go register at the meeting Thursday night. If I survive that long.

I also have some title things to research and submit so that I can start writing some articles. And I need to get RA7 finished in its drawing stage so I can paint it. RA8 needs to be started so I don’t have to worry about it when I’m on the cruise. 9 days! Woot! Oh, and I need to make the iron-ons for the matching shirts (oh, yes, we’re going to be one of /those/ groups lol). Tomorrow and Wednesday nights will be verra verra busy!

as taps plays softly in the background…

Mindy, btw, is the Dell laptop I bought a couple of years ago. She was a refurbed Inspiron 1150 but made the last 3 NaNo’s much more doable. But last year, 10 days into November she coded [bsod] on me and only through the resuscitative efforts of palmie and her beau was anything recovered. Palmie shared an ubuntu disk with me and that actually worked and was working fine, but I decided that it was time to give the Windows XP reinstall another go.

Now, mind you, I have hardly touched Mindy since Minnie showed up in January. But now it is June, and Script Frenzy! is upon us (for which I haven’t written a single word to date). I have sufficient credit on my Dell account to purchase a replacement but do I want to go into debt for a second computer I’m hardly going to use except for 2 months out of the year?

This is the quandry.

Yeah, yeah, I know, her harddrive is barely cold and I’m looking at replacing her. I may bring her into work tomorrow and see if our IT guy has any luck with her but I doubt it. the WinXP install didn’t work because of possible hardware failure. I suppose something could be loose, but I think she’s on borrowed time already.

Again, I’m not sure I want to spend the money on a secondary computer. I really did like my aunt’s teeny little dell laptop this Christmas (seriously, I don’t think it was as big as my purse), it was so lightweight and cute! Then there’s the whole everything PC comes with Vista now, and do I really want to deal with that hassle? Maybe I should just work on Minnie and handwrite at the write-ins (shudder!). Sure, I’ve got my Olympus, but I think the noise would bother the other writers. (Not to mention where would I find ribbons?)

Then there’s the work issue. We finally have a VPN set up at work for the accounting system but it’s not Mac-compatible. So if I ever need to work from home I’ll need another laptop. No, I don’t think asking work to buy me a laptop is a viable solution either, as the frequency of me doing work from home is probably on the low side. But work isn’t the only compatibility issue: not all sites play nicely with Mac/Safari or even Firefox and you can’t get an IE installation for Mac anymore.

I just so didn’t need to have to worry about this this month! Argh!