It's so… depress-iat-ing

I bought my first ThinkPad notebook computer a couple of years after moving to Sydney. There was a fantastic deal in Hong Kong, and a mate and I got one of our colleagues over there to help us to secure some. It was wonderful – the machine was basically my life in a portable black slab of circuitry. It stored personal information, allowed me to play games, functioned as a portable DVD player and a whole lot more besides. My back was turned to the world of desktop computing.

However, the Geek Lust™ does not give up so easily. Notebooks weren’t designed to be upgradeable, and as the march of technological progress continued, I found myself with a less and less capable machine. Great games were passing me by! Then, a few years down the track, let’s just say I was very pleased to find myself in possession of a brand new top-of-the-range model (long story). But the pleasure was hollow, since with the pinnacle of anything, there is no way up, only down. Never have I felt this more accutely than when I finally decided to throw in my love of portable computing for the upgradeability of a desktop computer.

At this stage of my life, with mortgages, babies and other costs looming, one of the consolations I gave myself for splurging on a brand new desktop was that I should be able to recoup a decent amount from the sale of my notebook, which would have cost over $5,000 when I first got it (if I had to pay full price for it). However when I checked around on eBay, the prices being offered were no more than a thousand or so. That’s four-bloody-thousand dollars worth of depreciation in around 12 months! That is absolutely ridiculous. I mean, yeah technology, like cars, is a commodity that depreciates very fast, but surely not four-grand-in-a-year fast?!

Well, I guess it’s a great buyer’s market right now. My new desktop (a Dell Inspiron 530 with a 24″ widescreen monitor) was cheaper than I could have ever imagined for a machine of that calibre, and now I have the luxury of upgrading incrementally. Oh, and having a huge screen is nice, very nice…

The snails rejoice

Update: Booyah! I’m back, baby! My e-mail is now hosted by GoDaddy. I lose some of the advanced spam-filtering capabilities from my previous service provider, but hopefully now I’ll be able to send e-mails when I’m at work (my company blocks SMTP, whereas GoDaddy has a mail relay on port 80).

If you’ve been having trouble e-mailing me in the last few hours (or maybe even days), then it’s probably because I’m in the middle of swapping mail servers. So it’s going to be a bit funny for while until the various computers sort themselves out. You can still get me on my work, hotmail, gmail, yahoo, or any number of other e-mail addresses if you want.

Can't blame a guy for trying

Ah yes, in the grand old tradition of capitalism (read: greed) I have finally succumbed to the menace of banner advertisements. My excuse is that the ads are being provided by Google, a company that includes “don’t be evil” as part of its madate, and that the proceeds are going towards f2o, the guys who are providing me with free hosting. Whatever helps me sleep at night, right?

(update: seems like this change will end up being good for a bit of amusement as well, seeing what kind of strange ads Google will serve up based on what I write. As I post this, the first ad in the column is “Edible insects”. Hahahaha…)

Closure

I was just reading my previous post about the laptop and I realised that if you’re actually bothering to follow my blog-life, I haven’t really provided any closure about that whole laptop affair, and closure is important to people with melancholic dispositions and the like. Without it they go crazy and get depressed and do silly things like listen to heavy metal music (or Celine Dion… I can’t decide which is worse).

Well since it’s getting a bit late and I have an early start tomorrow, I’ll keep it brief.

There was a whole debacle involving my debit card being billed twice, and then they took down my address wrong, so it was almost mis-delivered but for the vigilant actions of our most excellent mail staff. It’s a pity that none of them will be reading this blog, and also that none of them are in any position to help me boost my social, financial or any other status. Suffice to say I need not dwell too much longer on how great they are, ‘coz I’m not getting anything out of it.

Right. Ahem.

So yeah, at the time of writing, my dear Jenny is now the proud new owner of what must be the most sexy little black laptop ever, and I’m still awaiting the outcome of an escalation/complaint into why the heck my order was so stuffed up.

So there. Closure. (Well except for the bit about the escalation, but that’s what’s known in the industry as a cliffhanger, in order to trap you into coming back to find out what happens next. Mwahahahaha…)

The wee hours

This morning, I got up at 5am to buy a laptop.

Thank you, I hope your collective gasping will lead to a whole bunch of adverse weather conditions to torment the damn butterfly that keeps creating climatic chaos by flapping its wings.

Some people like to suffer for their art. Me? I like to think that my suffering is the art itself. Basically, what happened was that yesterday I discovered there was a crazy IBM Employee purchase deal involving a very limited number of laptops going for half price. So of course, being the overzealous and misguided romantic that I am, I decided to purchase one for my girlfriend Jenny despite knowing full well that I am more likely to receive expressions of incredulity and surprise rather than the lavish praise that my warped geek-imagination would have me believe was coming my way.

Long story short, I took advantage of a little bit of, shall we say, insider knowledge, to ensure that I was guaranteed to get one of these things – ie. I had to get up really, really early to beat everybody else. Wow. I am so smart.

As it turns out, I was the 5th person to make an order. 5th dammit! Apparently there was one guy who made an order 10 minutes after the promotion went live just before 3am in the morning. (At least I can tell Jenny that there were at least 4 other people in IBM who were even more desperate than me).

So here I am at the end of the day, and what do I have to show for my efforts? Nada. Zip. Zilch. They didn’t call me to confirm the order, and my Jenny is still sans-ThinkPad. I’m thinking that the other 4 guys ahead of me just bought them all and are probably listing them on eBay even as we speak (ok, ok… as I write, and you read… yes, even with the inherent time difference between when I was writing this and when you get around to reading it – there were quite a few laptops… yes, I have also considered the metaphysical implications of my addressing you when you might not even be reading this at all, kinda like that jazz about sounds of trees falling in forests and one hand clapping, etc.)

For the fellow geeks out there, the model that I picked up (supposedly, *ahem* pending a certain phone call *ahem*) is a ThinkPad X40 ultraportable with 12.1″ screen, 1.3GHz processor, 40GB hard drive, 256MB RAM, Windows XP Pro and all the usual accoutrements such as wireless, modem, USB ports and the like. Priced at $1,125.62 (Less with salary sacrifice option.)