I just watched this three times in the last ten minutes. It gets funnier with each viewing. Maybe I should go do some work now…

If the three grand price tag was dropped by about two grand, the over ten pound heft was reduced, and the primary screen’s size was halved, I might be in the market. Then again, I don’t think anybody would take their boots off for that.

I don’t frequently remember what I dream about. Saturday morning was the exception. The wife and I were walking down Tanager Lane in Columbia, MD. As we passed by a house that my granddad built and lived in, a helicopter passed overhead. Nothing out of the ordinary…yet. The helicopter just flew by us, but then circled back. After taking another glance at us, it passed for a second time. Then, without warning, it veered hard in our direction and came down for a landing. We took off running. And at that crucial moment, I woke up in a cold sweat.

Heart pounding furiously, I laid in bed and tried to go back to sleep. That wasn’t working very well, so I got up to visit the toilet. Finished with my duties, I headed over to my workstation just because it was 4am and there was nothing better to do. It had been a couple weeks since I did a complete backup of my main machine. As I prepared to hook up my drobo to run the backup, I noticed that there had been an 18 second power outage a couple hours earlier. Everything seemed to be working fine still and then the power meter started blinking, indicating that it was running on battery.

Strange, the power going out again? I peered out all the windows and none of the neighbors had power either. Deciding to test things out a little bit, I fired open a web browser. It worked. My apartment is without power, but I am able to get online via my wireless network router connected to a cable modem without a problem. (If you didn’t get the idea already, a UPS is a handy thing to have.) I got the phone number for Pepco and called in to report the power outage. They were already aware of the situation and said the problem should be fixed by 5am.

At this point I should’ve shut things down and trundled off to bed. But I was curious as to how long my CyberPower UPS would last. So I did some housecleaning on my laptop. Now, I could have made it last a lot longer if I had turned off my external monitor and shut down one of my computers earlier, but even with them I had power for over half an hour. Not too shabby, eh?

Moral of the story: When an Apache is after you, make sure to have your UPS fully charged and ready for action.

The poll results are in. Now for the next several months, I presume that we won’t be hearing as much from President-elect Obama and possibly a bit more from President Incumbent.

Last night I was in bed and asleep at 8:30 in the evening — something that is not all that common for me. As a result I didn’t watch the votes coming in and listen to all the political mumbo-jumbo on the tube. When Alexei decided it was time to get up at four this morning, for some reason the thought didn’t even cross my mind to find out who had won. Instead we just played until about six.

A few hours later when we got up, Anastasia asked if I knew who had won. My first reply was McCain. The second was Mickey Mouse. Finally, she told me. Which brings me to the point of this post: I don’t do news much.

I opened up my web browser and started typing “news” in the location bar. The first thing that auto-completed was BBC. Up for a non-American take on the situation, I clicked. Of course the main event was the American election, but scrolling down a little revealed that Windows 3.1 reached its end of life last Saturday.

Ah, the good old days. I don’t remember which birthday it was, but my parents bought me a copy of Windows 3.1 and a mouse from the Electronics Boutique store at the Columbia Mall (which at that time was called that). I’ll need to find a picture of that birthday just to see what my facial expression was. In my memory, I was the happiest kid around — I had a mouse. What more could there be to life? Remembrance is a wonderful thing; I don’t recall struggling with drivers or trying to find an additional 3k of RAM to free up, but the non-ergonomic 3-button white mouse.