A mostly non-Oz post

I hope you can all indulge me for a bit in a post that is mostly not about Oz, but it does have an effect on my Ozziness and some of my online Oz activities, so I think I'm justified. My computer died. It's no shock, it's nearly eight years old and I've been trying to baby it through the last legs of its existence, and Laura and I were already planning to save up for a new one. But the other night I tried to turn it on and it gave me a "You need to restart" message. Well, every time I did that I got the same message. So I think it's fair to say that it's dead. But the good news? I was at my parents' place when it happened, and they had a solution. My dad recently got a new computer, and while he and Mom were planning for her to take over his old computer, she was reluctant to let her old one go, and so they decided that I could have Dad's old computer. It's not that much newer than mine, but it does have a newer processor that can handle a lot more stuff. I've already made some major software upgrades, and now I can watch online videos (and found Hello Kitty in The Wizard of Paws online!) and do all kinds of other things I never could before. I'm also seeing a whole lot less of the spinning beach ball (that's the Mac equivalent of the hourglass, for Windows users out there). The biggest drawback is that I can't configure my e-mail program until I get home, and all of my files are on the old computer. So I'm going to have some troubles for a while, until I can deal with those, and I'll likely have to take my old computer to a shop to get my old files off. The non-wiki bits of the website may not get updated much for a while (and this may spur me on to putting more of my website into wiki format).

So, to sum up, it sucks that it happened, but it at least chose a great time and place to do so. And I think, in the long run, this is going to be a win-win-win situation for everyone.

But I think I still want a new computer...