Brettia

I solved my Brettia problem by beginning anew. After a database problem erase three weeks of posts (there weren’t many anyway), people didn’t much want to continue things, so I started Brettia 2.0, which is generally the same as the old Brettia but with new countries, characters, etc. Brettia 1.0 is still available at its regular URL.

With that behind me, I’ve got some new things to deal with. First, posting on Brettia consumes a lot of time. It can take 45 minutes to an hour to write a single long post, so if I post several times a day this can turn into hours of writing. Not necessarily a bad thing, but I’ve been letting it take precedence over homework, which I today learned is not a good idea. I did finish all my homework from Friday, but I did it all at 9:00 last night and some of it was waiting for me to do on the bus and in biology. Ever since I first started procrastinating in eighth grade it’s gotten worse, so I’ve pretty much given up at this point on trying to combat it. Definitely a bad habit to get into.

The second thing I have to deal with right now is school in general (obviously). Some classes are really beginning to get boring.
In Health (I have it until Oct. 10, when I switch to PE) things have always been the same boring stuff on drugs and alcohol and disease and nutrition that we first learned about years ago. Things might get better since tomorrow is the beginning of our Human Growth and Development unit, in other words, sex ed, and that is always interesting. (Not in a perverted way, but just because people make hilarious comments sometimes.)

Honors English has never been particularly stimulating, but there’s still hope. We’ve been covering the basics lately (setting, character, etc.), which is understandably boring, hopefully so that we can start doing something less monotonous in the future.

Honors geometry is weird because my class has six freshmen, including myself, and twenty-odd eighth graders from the middle schools nearby. It feels like I’m in seventh grade or something, and the teacher reminds me of one I had that year too. Math is not boring, its just easy (at least right now) and I don’t feel like applying myself. At least I can do all my homework in class.

Social studies could certainly be better. I find myself regretting not taking AP World History when I had the chance, since it would at least be a challenge. I’m in a class full of “jerk children” (populars, jocks, etc.) and most of them are complete idiots. I feel embarrased to even answer when others are yelling out “paper airplane” and “Japan.” The teacher isn’t bad though.

Biology sucks royally. Miss Drechsler is a great teacher, but her lessons are easy and boring most of the time. We never have homework. The real problem I have with this class is in the kids in it. They still think Kyle (my friend) and I are “Jedi” or “trekkies,” and the whole room goes quiet whenever I answer. Even if my answer or comment is perfectly well-constructed and correct, people look at me like I’m a complete dumbass. I should surround myself with mirrors facing outward so that they can look at themselves and think that.

Spanish might be my favorite class. I feel motivated to study it, I have a good grade, the class has lots of sophmores I can get to know…pretty good deal, really.

So school is good and bad at the same time. Let’s just say I anxiously await each weekend.

Today I found that my esteemed affiliate, the anonymous owner of ScYtH Networks, whom I periodically steal ideas and content from, is one step ahead of me in my quest to bring better technology to my home. (In other words, he wants/needs a new computer too.) Also, he just happens to want the exact same model that I want. How weird is that? Last night, feeling the craving for a new PC (or laptop) even more than ever after six crashes in a six-minute period, I searched all the computer manufacturer websites I could find for the best PC for me. Sadly, everything I saw that was any good had a giant price tag: well over $2,000.

But I won’t lament about the price, because that has already been pre-lamented and needs no more lamenting, at least not from me. Anyway, I looked at these fine manufacturers: Alienware, Apple, Dell, PricePC, ABSPC, Gateway, Sony, VPR Matrix, and eMachines. EMachines offered the lowest price, at $750, but they’re a value-priced PC company anyway (they use cheap Athlon and Celeron processors and offer no extra software or anything). I found the highest prices at Apple, where their new PowerPC G5 would set you back $3,810. (Keep in mind that I customized all the models listed, if possible.)

Before I continue, here’s what I am looking for: (Note, ‘;’ means ‘or’)

Desktop
AMD Athlon XP Processor 3000+; Intel Pentium 4 Processor 3.0GHz 800MHz FSB w/ 512KB Cache & HyperThreading
512MB DDR SDRAM PC-3200 - 2 x 256MB Module
NVIDIA GeForce FX 5600 Ultra 128MB 8x AGP w/DVI & S-Video
160GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 Serial ATA 7,200 RPM 8MB Cache
Samsung 52×24x52×16x CD-RW/DVD Combo Drive
Creative Sound Blaster Audigy 2 - 6.1
NVIDIA DualNet Integrated 100Mb Ethernet
3.5″ 1.44 MB Floppy Disk Drive - Black
Microsoft Windows XP Professional
NEC 17″ MultiSync FE771SB Flat CRT - Black
Creative Inspire 6.1 6600 Speakers - Black
Microsoft Internet Keyboard
Microsoft IntelliMouse Explorer 3.0 - USB
Microsoft Wireless Desktop Kit
Laptop
Intel Pentium 4 Processor 3.0GHz 800MHz FSB w/ 512KB Cache
512MB DDR PC-2700 - One SO-DIMM
80GB 4200 RPM ATA100
NVIDIA FX go5600 Module with 128MB DDR
Sound-Blaster Pro Compatible 3D Audio
24×10x24 CD-RW / 8X DVD Combo w/Software
Integrated 10/100Mb Ethernet NIC
Now, this is just a rough idea of what I want; things can be substituted for certain hardware, such as using an ATI video card rather than an NVIDIA. I do not prefer any certain processor manufacturer. Intel is great, but AMD is just as fast and somewhat cheaper. As long as it’s a 2.8-3.0 GHz processor, I don’t care what it is. (Burn Celerons, though!)

I want at least 512 MB of RAM. This might sound like a lot, but my current computer has 384 MB, but it really sucks. The real reason that my computer is obsolete is its mediocre Pentium III 533 MHz processor (equal to about 0.5 GHz), which is why I need a new PC. Upgrading the processor is about as expensive as buying a new computer altogether, and there’s a good chance it won’t work.

As I said, NVIDIA or ATI doesn’t matter. I do want a newer model graphics card, one that supports new DirectX 9 video game technologies. However, I don’t need a 256 MB graphics card, as nice as it sounds; a 128 MB will do fine. Besides, Alienware’s site says that it would cost nearly three hundred dollars to upgrade from a 128 to a 256. I’ll wait a while and upgrade it when they’re cheaper.

I want a 160 GB hard drive, but size doesn’t matter much when you’re talking that amount of space. 160 GB is incredibly roomy; you could store 50,000 3-megabyte MP3s in that amount of space, with room left over for Windows. Really, with hard drives, it’s best to look at three things: price per gigabyte, type of hard drive, and cache/buffer/RPM.
First, you never should pay more than $1 per gigabyte. Sometimes you must, and that’s okay, but you should always know that there is a cheaper drive if you’re paying above the $1/GB threshold. It can be worth getting a smaller drive if it is closer or below the threshold if a larger one is far above it. For example, Alienware has a 160 GB drive for about $200, but its 120 GB drive is only $124. I would buy the 120 GB because it is much more space for your money, even if it’s less total space.

The second thing you need to look at is hard drive type. There are currently two kinds to choose from: Serial ATA and the older ATA-100. Serial ATA, or SATA, is faster (though only marginally) because it can move data from the CPU and the memory to the hard disk and back quicker using a serial cable rather than a parallel cable. ATA-100 is fine for most users, but anyone wanting a small speed boost (in their hard drive performance, not overall performance) should look into SATA technology. Bear in mind that SATA is often times more expensive than its older counterpart.

The final thing you should look at when choosing a hard drive is its cache, or buffer, and its RPM (revolutions per minute, like in a car). Up until lately, most drives had a 512K cache or a 2 MB cache. Now, with 8 MB caches on new drives, this is the way to go. The larger cache allows for greater read-write speed and gives you overall better performance. RPM is the speed at which the drive spins. Never buy a drive with a speed of less than 7,200 RPM. (Except in laptops, where drives are normally 4,000-5,200 RPM. Newer drives may have a speed of 10,000 RPM, but this is only necessary for intense hard drive operations like copying DVDs or video editing.)

The next item I want is an optical drive (CD/DVD). A fast CD burner would run at about 52×24x52x speed, and I can’t bear to wait 20 minutes to burn a CD when I can now do it in five or less. Don’t bother with what the ‘52x’ stuff means, just know that the higher the numbers are, the faster it is. Finally, DVD burners are a new arrival in computer hardware, and they are not yet cheap enough to be worth buying. They can set you back anywhere from $250-$400, and they’re only useful for amateur video editors and the like. You could never fill up an entire 4.7 GB DVD just with backup stuff like documents and installers. Stick with CD burners for now, and just get a DVD reader with about 16x speed for good quality playback.

The next item on my list is a sound card. You don’t actually need a sound card for sound playback, since most computers come preloaded with software drivers for speakers and such, but I would recommend having one for two reasons: a) decreased load on your processor (software sound drivers rely on the processor to do the work, while hardware sound cards do everything themselves), and b) better compliance with other operating systems (if you ever want to switch to Linux, which I’d highly recommend for advanced users, you will need a hardware sound card as Linux doesn’t include as many software sound drivers as Windows does).

Next is the ethernet card. This is a no-brainer for anyone with cable or DSL Internet access, a home or business network, or anyone planning to scrap their ugly, horrible dial-up in favor of something better. These are not expensive and you should never get a PC without one. Speed is not a huge deal unless you need to transfer large chunks of data over your network; otherwise, don’t worry if you get a 100 MB or a gigabit ethernet card.

Floppy disk drives, the next item on my list of tech specs, seems to be useless in the age of CDs and DVDs which can hold so much more data. I would still recommend having a floppy drive for the simple fact that floppy disks are easy and small and sturdy; good for transferring data between home and work or school. They also come in handy when you need to make a Linux or Windows system rescue disk.

Some would wonder if Windows XP Professional is necessary for the regular user. I say that it is because of the extra features it gives you for networking (I will most likely set up a wireless network in my house to share my Internet connection with the family PC). XP Professional also has a better permissions system than XP Home, which allows users to protect their files with higher encryption and security.

For a monitor, notice that I chose a CRT (big clunky thing) instead of an LCD (slim pretty thing). First, I don’t mind the space it takes up. Second, LCD (Liquid Crystal Display) monitors are about twice to three times the price of CRTs. Third, LCDs can be weird with gamma and can display things incorrectly. Fourth, the whole “better for your eyes” argument no longer works because many CRTs now have flat screens just like LCDs. Finally, Windows 2005/6/7 (no date has been set), also known in the beta community as “Longhorn,” will require a monitor with higher DPI than current monitors support, so it isn’t worth it to buy an expensive one just to give it away when I upgrade to Longhorn later.

The final four things are pretty basic: 6.1 Speakers (to use the full power of my 6.1 sound card), mouse, keyboard, and Microsoft “Internet desktop kit,” which is their fancy name for a package of wireless networking tools like a base station and USB NIC (network interface card).

For a laptop, I want about the same thing, just a bit less speed, bytes, etc. because laptops generally have less hard drive capacity and such than desktops.
Another thing, desktop or laptop? I think I want a desktop, just because you get more for your money. A laptop would be nice because of its mobility, and it would be useful in college, but it’s likely I’ll get a new computer for college anyway and leave my dream PC for my parents to use. It’ll be like giving an 80-year-old man a Dodge Viper.

I don’t really want to take the time to post the specs for every computer I customized, so I’ll give ratings and prices for the manufacturers I tried. All PCs listed below are either equal to or above the requirements I set at the beginning of this entry.

Manufacturer - Price - Model - Rating - Comment
Alienware - $2700 - Area51/Aurora Enthusiast - 9/10 - Great, but high price
Apple - $2950 - PowerBook - 5/10 - Anti-Microsoft, but high price and low compatibility
Apple - $3810 - G5 - 4/10 - Fast 64-bit processor, but insane price and low compatibility
Dell - $3159 - Inspiron 8600 - 7/10 - Great, but still quite expensive
PricePC - $1437 - AthlonXP 3000+ - 8/10 - Quite cheap, but not sure if I’d trust a website
ABSPC - $2512 - Athlon64 - 8/10 - One of the few computers with the new Athlon64 processor, price is okay
ABSPC - $2318 - AthlonXP 3000+ - 9/10 - Price is agreeable, like Alienware
Gateway - $2739 - 700X - 7/10 - Pleasantly surprised with bang for buck, but still pricey
Gateway - $1760 - M350X - 6/10 - Good price, but less functionality
Sony - $2876 - Vaio - 5/10 - High end, media-centric, but expensive
VPR Matrix - $1200 - FT5110-PE - 7/10 - Great price, good features, but lower end
VPR Matrix - $2400 - 200A5 - 8/10 - Nice, sleek, laptop, but not feature-packed
eMachines - $750 - T2625 - 8/10 - Good speed, low price, but not top-of-the-line
And thus concludes my research on new PCs and laptops. It’s likely that I’ll end up settling for something much cheaper than this, but I really want a computer that I can be proud of, that I can brag about. Which is why I’m leaning toward an Alienware, just as DJ-ScYtH is.

Note: The average price of these machines is $2395. I have currently saved 2% of that amount.

And Brett posted to his weblog, and lo! the world said, “Yay.”
Or not. Everyone’s favorite weblog has been updated again. I know you’ve all been anxiously awaiting my next bit of whatever, I know you’ve been on the edge of your office chairs all this time, wondering when I would finally post another entry, and now I have come, and IT was good.

I’ll stop the Tolkien style now. Let him turn over in his grave at the mass of urfiness I have posted above. Um…anyway…

Brettia had a near-death experience. I was incredibly happy to see that my web host had installed a new control panel for me to play around with, and I accidentally deleted the phpBB database of posts and users and settings. I know, this seems impossibly stupid, but there was a little red X next to the phpBB database on the new control panel, and I clicked it, wondering what it meant. The control panel asked for no confirmation, nor did it say what it was doing until I saw what had happened and realization dawned. My curses could be heard for miles. My brother thought I was dying because I kept yelling SHIT at the computer screen. But I was alive, and Brettia was not.

I panicked for awhile, and contacted my host to see if they could recover the database. They could not. I then unearthed a three-week-old database backup I had done when switching to this new one back at the beginning of September. I was lucky enough to be able to successfully restore all posts up to September 4th. Not bad, considering the possibility of losing everything, equivalent to over 200,000 words and ten months of writing by eight people.

A severe crisis was narrowly averted, but it was a crisis all the same. My friends will not be happy. I wouldn’t blame them if they left Brettia completely, but I hope they decide to stay. I know I’ll never be such a dumbass again.

Today I got to go on an SSV [Super Stupid Vacation (© Keegan)]. This is any kind of family trip which I either dread or think is completely pointless. It turned out all right; we went up to this place by Slide Rock State Park that’s unknown and secret, which means that it wasn’t one-tenth as busy as the actual Slide Rock area. (Slide Rock is a natural sandstone rock formation in the bottom of Oak Creek near Sedona, Arizona. The slippery surface and slow-moving water provides an excellent waterslide-like experience, though the water is quite cold.)

We got home at about eight, and I restored Brettia soon after. I hadn’t even thought of the backup I had made until we were on our way home from Slide Rock. Stupid is as stupid does.

Technology-wise, nothing has improved. I had planned on trying to negotiate a match deal with my dad to get a computer, but I haven’t put it forth yet. I need a good sound plan, but either way they’re going to end up paying a lot of money. I’ll need about one to two thousand dollars, which is quite a lot, to me at least. I know two different people who can build a PC for half the price of a regular Dell or HP, so I’m going to look into talking to them.
Chances of my getting anything are pretty slim, at least until my birthday in nine months, since we (my family) might be going to Europe (this would be my third time) over spring break. I’m thankful and happy to get to travel a lot, but I always end up going on some expensive trip right when I have the greatest chance of finally getting my dream computer. Earlier this year, when the war in Iraq was going on, we had contemplated canceling the trip, but we decided to go ahead anyway. This was the right decision, since everything had died down by the time I left, but my mom had promised me I could get a new computer with the money that had been going for the trip if I opted out. One more chance lost.

With another trip possibly blocking me for a third time (there was another time back in sixth grade), I’m not entirely sure I really want it to happen. In the event that we do go, it’ll cost about $4,500 for all of us, which is not at all cheap, and both my parents are wanting to get new cars because my mom’s lease is up on the Malib (yes, it’s a Malib, because the ‘u’ is missing from the back lettering [melted off]) and my dad has been having many problems with his Jeep that he keeps having to get fixed. My mom wants some kind of SUV and my dad now wants a Jeep Rubicon, which is the same as the regular Jeep Wrangler but really tricked out.

This car thing leaves me wondering what I’ll end up getting to drive when I’m old enough. If I can’t even save up enough money for a $2000 computer then I certainly will never be able to get a $10,000 - $20,000 car, depending on if it is used or not. Meaning that I will be driving one of my parents’ cars. Up until now I was engaged to the Jeep, but that engagement might be broken if Dad gets a Rubicon (he’d be really attached to it). And I don’t want to drive an SUV, because the gas would be so expensive (SUV = bad gas mileage).

This weekend was supposed to be a good one. No homework (at all) nothing I need to do, just a weekend of relaxing, reading, and tinkering. That’s all I wanted to do. Then there was pain and Brettia and SSVs, and now one day is gone and I haven’t relaxed or read or tinkered at all. But tomorrow is football, so I’ll be free from 10:00 to 7:00. YAY!

This just in: Brett posts to his weblog using the most profound title ever created: “Why?” Now the world wonders “why” Brett chose this and another suicide bomb kills fifteen and injures 45 in Israel.

Yup. Today I ask, why? Why did I wake up 12 minutes late this morning (which is a pain in the ass if you only give yourself half-an-hour to get up and get ready)? Why did I choose not to work on my English essay? Why are we here? Why is my dad telling me to go to bed? Why won’t he go away?

These burning questions will remain forever unanswered. We will never know the truth. But anyway, back to a more interesting topic, me. (Yes, I’m a very modest person.) I said I’d post Friday and I didn’t; things just kept coming up and I ended up posting tonight, since I have virtually no homework. (Except that English essay, which I don’t feel like doing.) Last night I planned on blogging but didn’t because I’d already fried my brain over some painfully frustrating object-oriented code that I was trying to alter for my own uses. Luckily there were no side effects of this frustration; I didn’t break my code or anything. So that’s my excuse.

I moved Organon, if you didn’t notice already. I was growing tired of EDataRack’s constant outages and downtimes and email problems, so I killed them. Now both of my sites are on Brettia. It was stupid to have two separate sites in the first place. You see, I have this problem with being quite volatile in my decisions. One day I might think something is a good idea, the next I scrap it completely. Same with brettepps.com and http://www.brettia.com. At first it seemed like separating the blog from the site was a good idea (Organon was formerly at http://www.brettia.com/nucleus/), but I have since found that this subdomain system is much better. Having my own server and hosting myself would be nice, but Cox charges $60/month for a hosting-grade connection and I’d have to buy a $600 server and configure it, which can be a nightmare. Plus, I’d have no control panel or anything to set things up; it’d all have to be done manually.

I had to do a presentation today in social studies. I awed my audience with a PowerPoint slideshow and conquered my natural fear of public speaking and did a really good job. I’m happy.

I use w.Bloggar now for my blogging instead of the normal MT textarea, and it crashed a minute ago. I’m no longer happy. I lost two paragraphs of writing. Grr… Anyway, I recently switched from MozillaFirebird back to regular Mozilla, which is, though not as versatile, more well-supported. Get it at Mozilla.org. I got tired of the lack of Themes and stuff, so I went back to the good old dinosaur.

Finally, to put an end to the crud I have so far written, I found a neat new tool called WhatPulse which counts the number of keystrokes you do in any specified period of time. I’m up to 6,610 keystrokes since about 5:00 PM. That’s about 28 per minute. I need to work on getting that down and using the mouse more, but I’m addicted to keyboard shortcuts. (Like CTRL + V for Paste, or CTRL + C for Copy.) There’s a neat Linux program called Mousepedometa that comes with the KDEToys package that calculates mouse mileage, and I’ve already reached 5,000 miles on that. (In about a week.) Imagine if that were a car…the amount I’d have to pay for gas.

Sorry I waited so long before writing again, my faithful readers (if there are any). I really shouldn’t be writing now, since it’s 9:45 and I’m supposed to be asleep. Yes, it isn’t that late, but my parents have been really sticky this year about getting me to go to bed on time because I was up until 11:30 or midnight sometimes last year. It didn’t affect my grades much then, though, yet I now get two more hours of sleep and find that my grades have certainly slipped overall compared to my middle school averages. A drop between middle and high school is to be expected, I suppose, since classes are harder and there are more of them.

English has quickly become my least favorite class, owing to the fact that all we do is read stupid lit book stories about birds and crazy Russian hunters. Then we take those stories and “discuss them,” which usually means we have to write 1-2 written pages about the setting or something. What I hate most is that I signed up for Honors English so that I might hone my writing skills to perfection, but we have yet to do any kind of creative writing after almost five weeks of school. Disappointed is probably too strong a word, but I’m certainly not happy with the class. Sure, a writer needs to master the basics of English literature before continuing to pen his own tales, but I’m too impatient to care. Just one freeform writing project would satisfy my hunger, or perhaps a pick up on Brettia.

In case you have no idea what Brettia is, it’s a forum I set up for my friends so that we could make our own little fantasy world for role-plays and stuff. I know, it sounds stupid when I describe it like that, but it can actually be quite fun and interesting. Lately though, people have been too busy to check the boards or to post on them, so things have quietly drifted into a limbo state, where time has stopped and doesn’t want to get off its ass and start up again.

So I’m disappointed in Brettia too. I thought it would live much longer than it has (10 months, so far). But I guess this is the price I pay for depending on a core group of about eight people to do most of the contributing. When one leaves or is absent, the entire thing crumbles into oblivion. I considered closing Brettia back in early August, but it was saved by a few enthusiastic sevie hafe beets (inside joke) who have nothing better to do than post. But now even they have stopped, and the main posters, Tyler (my best friend), Dylan (another friend), and Keegan (another, somewhat alienated friend) have quit checking the board altogether. Even if I remind them at school, they just ask what’s going on and act indifferent when I tell them that nothing is going on because they’re not there.

Perhaps all good things must end. Like middle school, that fantasy world of no homework and easy classes. I incredulously remember times when I complained about this miniscule homework load, which seemed maximized by the wealth of other things to do, such as post or sleep. Now, doing anything other than homework would be a relief. I hobble downstairs for a glass of water five times an hour just to be able to leave the office which is my cave. I’m like a prehistoric Neanderthal couch potato who never leaves his lair. Except I have no choice. Sure, I could just blow off my homework and endure the glares from my teachers, like my good friend Dylan, who doesn’t do his math homework because he says the tiny five point assignments don’t matter. But that would be against my nature, and so I am held captive by my own pride. I’m already disappointed (there’s that word again) in myself for losing the glossy, gold-leafed grades I once had. For a smart kid, the word slipping is like the word gaining for overly weight-conscious women.

The real reason I am torn between parts of myself is that my love for programming and study of computers is to blame for the recent loss of GPA hundreths of a point. I can’t really abandon computers, but I can’t abandon school. If I stop programming/tinkering, I’ll forget things and lose all I’ve struggled to gain over the past two years. Not only that, but technology is ever-changing, and I have to stay on top of things. If I stop trying as hard as I used to in school, I’ll be doing the equivalent of shooting my future self in the foot. I don’t want to end up working for a Circle K, remembering that fateful day when I gave up and went on to pursue programming as far as I could. Then my parents disowned me and left me without a computer or food. Then again, I don’t want to end up going to college, getting some normal office job in a monolithic corporation, and spending the rest of my life as a paperpusher/key depresser. I want to have skills so unique that they can prove valuable in developing something entirely new that I can sell to that same monolithic corporation I might have worked for and retire on the profits.

Again, I’m torn. I can’t get rid of one or the other, and I can’t balance the two. But anyway, I’m done babbling about that. I have some other things to get out before I publish and collapse into bed.

First, the site has been down of late. Sorry. It wasn’t my fault this time. Purportedly, the Internet backbone provider for my less-than-perfect webhost, EDataRack, rerouted their network and took some servers offline in the process. Organon was down for nearly four days, much to my dismay, and on a weekend, to my further disappointment (again!). I only get time to post lengthy articles on weekends and it really sucked to have to wait until now, when I should be asleep since I have an impossibly hard English test in the morning and some other classes that I probably shouldn’t fall asleep in.

The second thing I need to belt out to the many people (cough) reading this is that they need to go to area51.phpbb.com/phpBB22/index.php right now to see phpBB 2.2 Milestone 2, which works great and is, quote, “wicked awesome.” Download it from the Snapshots page at Area51’s root and install it on your own computer, if you happen to be geeky enough to run one or more development webservers on your PC.

And speaking of PCs and computers in general (as if I haven’t been talking about them the entire time), it’s now time for the weekly “I Want A New Computer But Am Too Poor/Deprived/Sad/Cursed to Get One” rant. Or not. No, I won’t do that anymore, if I can help it. Yes, I want a new computer badly. Yes, I’d give up all my Christmas and birthday presents for the next three years to have one. Yes, I’m jealous of the many other people in my life who are either shopping for or already have a nice, sleek, new PC or laptop, complete with that straight-out-of-the-box scent that overpowers even new-car smell.

That’s all I will say. In the event that I win the lottery or inherit a sack of money, then I’ll celebrate, just to spite those of you in the same boat as I am. Otherwise, I regret my somewhat spoil’t brat ranting on this subject in the past and hope that you, the reader, will forgive me for being an ultraprick and boring you with my tales of technological despair. (No, I was not paid to write that.)

The final bit of outstandingly interesting news in my life is that I moved my dying website, the aforementioned Brettia, to a new, faster, more awesome webhost, who is the epitome of cool (if you’re an antisocial workaholic who has nothing better to do than to build simple Web applications and then singlehandedly destroy them through misuse and lack of proper backup). The new host, MediaCatch, allows me to create subdomains (like xxx.brettia.com - porn seekers, don’t even try that URL), create unlimited databases and POP3 email accounts, and to install software automatically using cPanel, all for the low price of $3.75/month. I also get 800MB of space, 24 hr email support, 8 hr phone/chat support, 35GB of bandwidth, and some other perks. This deal is so awesome it’s unheardof. It rocks. It makes me happy. Yay.

Tune in Friday for an exciting article on the state of the Internet and perhaps an interview of my cat. Yup, sounds like real, edge-of-your-seat, mind-blowing action. Here’s a nice quote to hold you until then: “I think, therefore I am.” -Rene Descartes. I have a question for our French philosopher friend. What if you don’t think? Do you cease to exist? Yeah, that puts a hole in your entire argument, doesn’t it Descartes. Which proves once and for all that the French are pompous, self-important losers who think that they have power in the world just because they ruled most of Europe for about a hundred years. Then the British, who we Americans know and love (most of the time), came and kicked their butts, leaving them with nothing but a funny accent. (And anger when they take the train to London and are forced to disembark at Waterloo Station. Brings back the memories, don’t it, me Frenchies?)