Not a nice day on Snob Hill....

The rarified air of billionaire's row isn't any better than mine down here in the cheap seats today. In fact, I think it's better down here among the peasants, even if we do occasionally get shot at.

Computer Update: Found out today what went wrong with that one-month-old Acer x3200 that died on the weekend - it was the hard-drive that packed it in. A new 640 Gb drive that only lasted 30 days! Wonderful. And I used to make jokes about my first old used Dell with its little old hard-drive that was only a fraction of the size of present ones. Hah! it lasted longer than many of these fancy newer ones. When I junked that PC, the hard-drive was still fine.

I spent an hour or so today in the computer department at London Drugs, trying out a couple of new computers there. I found an HP with a 22-inch touch screen that I could easily fall in love with - it has everything, and can do everything but prepare dinner. It looks a lot like the big Imac, but it has a lot more under the hood, including more RAM, more USB ports, and a nicer keyboard & mouse. The big Imac is nice too, but it's a little lean on RAM, and its hard-drive isn't the greatest either. Coupled with the fact that there are only a limited number of third-party programs that can be run on it, and that made it not my first choice. Or, as Dwight at the repair shop says, "You're a guy who loves to tinker with all kinds of weird and wonderful programs, and you'd hate a Mac - you couldn't run half of them on it, and you'd be ready to trade it back in after a week. And besides, you're already getting a bigger bang for your buck with what you have now." He's right about that - I can't argue about that. But if I suddenly decide to go nuts and go first class, I'm going to be looking at that big HP with the touch screen technology, and the built-in camera, and the connection to plug in a TV signal, and......(the list goes on and on...) because it looks like it's really worth the $1800 plus tax that it would cost. It has the most impressive list of "standard equipment" I've ever seen on a computer, and it takes almost an hour just to check out most of that, and try it out. Like I said, I could easily fall seriously in love with that one.