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Last Day of the Worst Year of My Life...Or

Or...You're Only As Strong As Your Worst Habits. So choose your bad habits wisely.

The amazing, evil caramel chocolate walnut brownie just materialized in our refrigerator overnight. I'm not making this up. Suddenly, it was just THERE, strategically situated, in the middle of the middle shelf, virtually impossible to ignore.

I didn't buy it, and the only other possible culprit was safely asleep and snoring gently. Lucky guy. Anyone else I'd have up pulled up by the pajama lapels, demanding answers. As of yet, my eight year old has demonstrated no nocturnal wandering patterns, much less any capability of getting one of the Maximas out of the garage at night and making a run to the all night convenience store on Pico Boulevard.

So, it was just me and the brownie, in a standoff. But it was no contest. Wasn't just ANY old brownie. The dark caramel on this one was a couple of millimeters thick. The dark chocolate was Black Hole dense. I'm not even sure there was any cake in there. Maybe the baker decided too much cake would be superfluous. And the walnuts, they were just ridiculously huge, like grown too close to the San Onofre Nuclear Power Plant huge. Any second, I was expecting that old guy from the Miracle Gro commercials to step out of the shadows, help himself to a glass of milk and ask, 'Are you going to eat all of that?'

And yes, I'm ignoring that crack you just made about the big walnuts and your thinking that this was just some warm and wet between my thighs dream. Real brownie damn it. I kept the plate and the crumbs and a smear of that dark chocolate on it. It was still there, mute evidence, this morning.

Oh yes, I ate it. It was not to be denied. A brownie like that also takes a LOT of milk to wash it down. I must have had three glasses. All pretense of the diet out of the window. Tried the 36D bra this morning that was still too loose to wear just a couple of months ago and, this morning, it fit. One last defeat before the end of the year in which I lost my mom, my freedom, the last little shred of my innocense, and walked completely unprepared into the 14-year single parent commitment of raising my little brother at least through the age of 22.

Oh, and also the year in which I began to doubt whether any of this was good for Roy. He's been the usual rock of strength and stability, and Julian and he have really taken to one another. But the thing about males playing these roles is that it is often hard to know exactly what is going on inside.

Unable to sleep and feeling flushed from a calcium, niacin and sugar rush, padding around my house naked, I eventually turned to my old standby, the BBC World Service Radio Online. Funny thing about the Brits, those close genetic links that my Irish ancestors kept trying to wipe off the face of the earth, and vice versa. They used to own so much of the world ('The sun never sets on the British Empire') that they apparently feel some paternalistic need to still cover the place journalistically as if they still owned it. No one covers everything better than they do.

Per usual, I began to feel a lot less afflicted, and a lot less unlucky. The list of people who were definitely, probably or at least possibly having much worse nights than me was long indeed.

Charles Barkley somehow figured that someone as large as an ex-NBA power forward, in whatever vehicle is large enough to hold him, could weave home drunk last night and not get pulled over. Wrong.

The hockey player and the teen mom chose a name for the grandson of the wannabe vice-presidential candidate, Sarah Palin. The poor kid will get to walk around elementary school with the name "Tripp Johnston." Why they didn't just name him "Kick Me johnston" is unclear, but perhaps this is what you get when you have uncles named "Track" and "Trig."

Kevin Bacon, the latest to be revealed as another one hoodwinked by Bernie Madoff's $50 billion financial swindle, will be starring in a new movie entitled "Six Degrees of Separation From Your Money."

All over the world, thousands of 30-gig Microsoft Zune digital media players began locking up and dying because of something called the Z2K9 glitch, finally exposing what Steve Jobs has been up to during these past several weeks of hiding out.

Matt Dillon figured he could zoom through Newbury, Vt. at 2 a.m. in the morning doing 106 miles per hour in a rented 2009 Chevy Impala. Wrong. We've been to Newbury. Only folks awake there at that hour are the police and state troopers who earn less in one year than Dillon makes on one episode of Entourage.

Somewhere outside Detroit, a GM executive sprang awake in a cold sweat, thinking that his boss  should have chosen the Impala instead of the hybrid when he drove to Washington to ask for a multibillion federal bailout.

And, on a serious note, other parents in Colombia, Peru, Somalia, Angola, the Congo, Zimbabwe, The Gaza Strip, Israel, Iraq, Afghanistan, Algeria, Burundi, Uganda, Sudan, Chechnya, Sri Lanka, Burma and other conflict ridden places or areas smouldering on the brink of such conflict too numerous to mention here were probably just hoping to get through the night in some semblance of peace and quiet.

Me? I lost a faceoff with a brownie. I looked in on my little boy, sleeping peacefully. I went to bed, and fell fast asleep.

My First Christmas (as a Mommy)

I envy those parents who got to dream of doing it, those couples who got to talk it over, take classes, bond over it. But with more than six billion people on the planet, and with a lot of those living spaces in horrible and dangerous conditions, I'd have to think that the perfect way of preparing oneself for children is something that really doesn't happen very often.

Wasn't perfect for me. One day the older step sister, more than a little aloof because of the huge 18-year age difference. The next, after my mom's unexpected death, a soon to be adoptive mother of that same little boy I used to call my lil bro. As Indiana Jones said, we're making this up as we go along.

Still, the first Christmas wasn't bad at all.

Lighting and decorations: C+. Okay, so it wasn't good that I finished hanging all the lights the day AFTER Christmas. At least they look nice.

Lighting and decoration placement: F. The TWO cords crossing the top of the staircase were incredibly bad ideas. And me, veteran hostess of LAN parties, ought to have known better.

Thank you cards: D. We'll start them. Before you know it. Soon. This week. Seriously.

Shepherding my son through various family and friend gatherings: A+. My, God, 2008 cannot end soon enough. So many relatives who have lost huge amounts of their savings, whose home values have plummeted, whose careers are uncertain. And, for God knows what reason, they all had to pour their souls out to ME, who doesn't exactly feel well equipped to help. But I love my son so much. He's so intuitive already at age 8. We developed a way of sizing up a room pretty quickly. Me, for the adults and him for the other kids. If it didn't look promising, we would disappear and find a private room where we could watch part of a movie together on my notebook computer: Firehouse Dog was pretty fun. Key part of getting through any kid's movie (for me): a good actor as the leading man (Bruce Greenwood.)

Choosing presents: A-. At the last minute, I managed to talk Julian out of the 5-piece drum set and into the Fender Mini Squier electric guitar and mini-amplifier, which he can use with headphones, thereby preventing drum induced migraines around the household for at least another year. We also bought it at McCabes, which is the Nirvana of guitar stores. Such an awesome place and such cool people working there.

Fending off another holiday season of unwanted advances: A+. Cake! Nothing wilts a horny man faster than the sound of "Mommy" and the patter of little feet.

Christmas dinner: C+/B-. Never ever attempt to cook two different things that you have never cooked before, on the same day. The chocolate souffle was a disaster. Chocolate puddle is a better description. The Prime Rib was an amazing success. It's gone already, the last of it with Roy's eggs this morning. Five-year-old Gourmet Magazine recipe, via Epicurious. It's called prime rib with herbed crust and madeira sauce.

Funny, after trimming it and bubbing it with paste and stuffing it with garlic slices (my idea) and every other part of the pre-oven preparation, I didn't even want to taste it. If more of us had to work regularly with large hunks of raw meat, more of us would be Vegan.

The Zalman ZM-NC2000: just remember it's for hot notebooks, not hamburger

If there are any hardcore barbecue grillers or broilers in your household, make sure that you get to this overnight delivery package before they do.

With a dark, non-reflective gun metal black cast throughout and 928 air holes, it might easily be mistaken for the latest George Foreman hamburger grill, or worse. You could come home to find Barbecue Boy looking for the latch so he can open it and insert the charcoal briquettes.

In fact the Zalman Notebook Cooler ZM-NC2000 is so decidedly un-Zalmanesque in its appearance that it is hard to imagine it coming from the same Seoul, South Korean firm that is responsible for some of the most audaciously designed computer cooling equipment ever produced.

If the definitive global Design Museum of Electronic Art is ever built, you would have to reserve an entire wing for Zalman. Their work is that amazing. Check out the amazing cpu heat sink shown below, the graphics card heat sink, and the 120 mm fan for some current examples. 

And in case you think I'm just gushing to get a freebie here, let me point out that I paid retail for this notebook cooler. This is not so much a product review as a piece I'm writing because I have seen so much junk out there masquerading as effective laptop cooling solutions.

The device looks this way because it is designed to be both unseen and unheard. The largest high performance rendering or gaming notebooks will cover it completely. For smaller boxes, it presents a low distraction background that isn't constantly screaming Look At Me. It also comes in silver, if you prefer.

Ostensibly, you buy a notebook cooler because you do a lot of typing in places where there are no  suitable tabletops or typing platforms available, and because you are tired of suffering the thigh scorching pain that comes after your little box begins to heat up after only a few minutes.

The ZM-NC2000 performs well for that kind of situation, presenting a very stable surface for typing and touchpading, even with fingernails that tend to be a little too long. The gentle angle of the device is great ergonomically as well.

But it isn't really designed for your lap. Because it is built to allow its two fans to draw air up from the bottom to distribute through all of those tiny holes, it rests on four ever so short feet of its own. You can feel those feet pressing into your thighs, and it's distracting and uncomfortable. It leaves marks in your cool business skirt, too. The two rear feet are adjustable and can be flipped out to allow even greater air circulation. It's built to be on a hard surface, not your thighs.

To be honest, if you don't do a lot of literal laptop work on your lap, if you're only on a few seconds or a few minutes for very brief tasks, you do NOT need a notebook cooler. Any thin hardcover book that can easily slide inside your notebook bag with your computer will serve well, and for a lot less money.

The Zalman ZM-NC2000 retails for $51.55 to $62.99. And for extra cooling on the cheap, slide an unsharpened pencil or a ruler just under the screen, for better air circulation.

But if you've coughed up thousands of dollars to own the kind of gaming notebook that turns more heads entering a LAN party than Megan Fox does while walking at the beach, a cooler is a very reasonable investment. The same is true if you are doing hardcore rendering and computer design on a desktop replacement computer.

I bought mine for use with my new Acer 8930-6648 Gemstone Blue notebook. With it's absolutely gorgeous 18.4", 1920 x 1080 capable high definition screen, fast 2.53Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo T9400 processor and relatively fast Nvidia GeForce 9700M GT graphics card and even a 7,200 rpm hard drive instead of the usual pokey 5,400 rpms, it runs a little hot. That's especially on those very rare occasions when I'm not parenting or working or doing unmentionable things with Roy, when I am playing City of Heroes or City of Villains or my cute but oh so deadly Elfin self on Lord of the Rings Online.

The cooler and the notebook like each other: there's a firm no sliding stability between the two. The cooler discretely draws its power from the computer via a short USB cord, so there is no need to find yet another electrical outlet.

Even dialed to its highest speed, I had to hold my hand close and feel the air flow to know that the cooler was actually on and working. It's that quiet. Completely unobtrusive.

Best of all, and unlike most of the notebook coolers I've seen, it actually works.

My notebook's cooling system switches into overdrive less often. The exhaust air flow is hot less often, and my notebook runs quieter.

These days, I don't even turn the notebook on without the Zalman connected.

Depending on what part of the bottom of the computer is being affected, the temperature difference between notebook only without external cooling and the notebook with the Zalman's whisper quiet high fan setting turned on is pretty amazing.

With the notebook cooler on, your box is between 3 degrees cooler on the Celsius scale to 7 degrees Celsius, depending where your notebook gets hottest.

I haven't seen a single, off the shelf, retail notebook cooler that works better. But I have seen quite a few where there is little if any real difference in notebook temperature.

If you are shopping for a high end notebook computer, or if you already own one, you can either put your hardware at risk of serious overheating from long hours of continuous use, or you can get a Zalman.

When your day is done and you're just trying to have a little fun, it's nice not having to wonder whether your computer is about to imitate the nuclear slag pile beneath the Chernobyl reactor.

New Distributed Computing Projects

By now, a lot of you know the DCP drill. For those of you who don't, it's really very simple. You pick a project that interests you, perhaps off of a site that tries to keep track of all active and future distributed computing projects, like this one. You download the algorithm or processing software that does the work. You then download small, very manageable, bite-sized blocks of data. Single core or single chip computers work on one such work unit at a time. Multi-core chips can work multiple work units at the same time.

Once the work unit has been processed, the results are uploaded and new work units are downloaded and the process begins anew. This is all much easier than it was in the old dialup days, when you had to frequently reconnect to deliver processed work and obtain new work to analyze.

For the most part, these computations are built to run in the background, using very low processing power that should not interrupt any of your normal work. Some can be set to only operate when your computer is idle. Some users run the programs only at night. I make it a practice of only using my home-based computers for this kind of hobby. Sometimes, these projects can become quite competitive, with individuals or groups of teams trying to beat competitors with the fastest average work times orwith the biggest totals for units processed. But I would resist the urge to add the client to computers at your workplace unless you have received explicit permission to do so.

Of course, it never hurts to ask your boss. Sometimes, the most fun DCP groups are based at workplaces, where the project helps increase camaraderie and gives everyone a goal toward a worthy project.

It's been a long time in computer years since Roy and I did the original SETI@Home project and the climate change project. And where our computers were most often single cpu machines, all but one now has two or four computer cores.

We can do this guilt free for two reasons. First, we've learned that the Marine Layer, the offshore air flow that brings us those wonderful negative ions and the lovely fog banks is murder on computers that are allowed to sit idle. We either have to run them on a daily basis or seal them in plastic. And we are off the grid, running our home on a 3.8 Kilowatt solar panel array. So, we are generating no greenhouse gases from coal-fired electricity plants.

With the massive computing power available in our house, we've decided we can devote each box to a different project, so it's going to be fun.

Tonight, we're trying to decide what science projects we will be working on. Besides, this is critical update night for the woefully hackable Microsoft software we run, which sort of limits our ability to game. (16 critical updates tonight! 200Mbs!!)

But first, the hardware. We'll be skipping two computers. The little Acer Aspire One netbook I carry in my bag runs quite hot and probably shouldn't do any full time numbers crunching. And Roy's new notebook, with its 1.46Ghz dual core chip, is already pretty taxed in terms of what he is demanding from it. But that still leaves us with a lot to spare:

Desktop One: Custom made computer, Intel Core 2 Quad 6600 @2.40 GHz (4x cpus) 8Mb L2 cache, 1066MHz FSB, 4Gb DDR2 800Mhz RAM, Windows XP Professional 64-bit edition

Desktop Two: Custom made computer, Intel Core 2 Quad 6600 @2.40Ghz (4x cpus), 3Gb DDR2 800MHz RAM, Windows XP Professional 32-bit

Notebook One: Acer Aspire 8930-6648 Gemstone Blue, Intel Centrino Core 2 Duo T9400 @2.53GHz (2x cpus) 6Mb L2 cache, 1066MHz FSB, 4Gb DDR3 1066Mhz RAM, Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit

Notebook Two: Acer TravelMate 4001CLi, Intel Centrino Pentium M 715 @ 1.50GHz (1x cpu), 2Mb L2 cache, 400MHz FSB, Windows XP Home.

The one thing that bothers us here is that we currently have not a single AMD chip to compare to the Intel chips, something that is always fun. But we tend to buy the best chips available at the time. For my former gaming desktop, that was the AMD X2 4800+, and back then, we had no Intel chips. Similarly, we are an all NVIDIA household at the moment in terms of GPUs.

Likely DCP projects (the following information comes from the distributedcomputing.info web site):

Climateprediction.net -- predict Earth's climate 50 years from now. The project uses a large-scale Monte Carlo simulation to predict what the climate will do in the future. On June 22, 2004, the project began a new phase of its experiment, to study "Thermohaline Circulation (THC) slowdown," or how climate might change as CO₂ changes in the event of a decrease in the strength of the thermohaline circulation. This kind of climate change is shown in the movie The Day After Tomorrow. Participants can choose between running the old or the new experiment. On August 26, 2005 the project began a new sulphur cycle experiment "to identify the effects of sulphate aerosol on the global climate system [the 'global dimming' effect] and the sensitivity of the model to perturbing sulphur cycle parameters." This experiment adds 2 additional phases to the three phases of the tradtional experiment. On September 4, 2008 the project began a HADSM3 Mid-Holocene (hadsm3mh) experiment. On October 1 2008, the project began a HADCM#L geoengineering experiment. HARDWARE DIFFICULTY: Demanding. A single work unit can take six weeks to process on a 1.4Ghz computer

SETI @Home: Search for extra-terrestrial radio signals. On July 25, 2008, the project owners began releasing work units for SETI's Astropulse project. The project passed 2 billion credits on July 14, 2005. The project received its 1 billionth result on September 24, 2008.

Orbit @Home: Monitor the impact hazard posed by Near Earth Objects. The project uses the Orbit Reconstruction, Simulation and Analysis framework. More information can be found at the ORSA@Work website and in a presentation poster titled Distributed Computing and Near Earth Objects, published by Pasquale Tricarico of Washington State University on November 14, 2004. The project completed its testing phase on May 28, 2008, and began its public beta test on May 31, 2008.  Version 1.31 of the project's SurveySimulator client is available for Windows, Linux and Mac OSX as of May 28, 2008.

Untouched - The Veronicas

Watch the video here.

I go ooh ooh, you go ah ah
lalalalalalalala

lalalalalalalala
I wanna wanna wanna get get get what I want
Don't stop
Give me give me give me what you got got
Cause I can't wait wait wait any more more more more
Don't even talk about the consequence
Cause right now you're the only thing that's making any sense to me
And I don't give a damn what they say, what they think think
Cause you're the only one who's on my mind
I'll never ever let you leave me
I'll try to stop time for ever, never wanna hear you say goodbye (bye bye bye)

I feel so untouched
And I want you so much
That I just can't resist you
It's not enough to say that I miss you
I feel so untouched right now
Need you so much somehow
I can't forget you
I've gone crazy from the moment I met you

Untouched
And I need you so much

See you, breathe you, I want to be you
Alalalala alalalala
You can take take take take take time time
To live live the way you gotta gotta live your life
Give me give me give me all of you you
Don't be scared
I'll see you through the loneliness of one more more more
Don't even think about what's right or wrong, wrong or right
'Cause in the end it's only you and me and no one else is gonna be around
To answer all the questions left behind
And you and I are meant to be so even if the world falls down today
You've still got me to hold you up up
And I will never let you down (down)

I feel so untouched
And I want you so much
That I just can't resist you
It's not enough to say that I miss you
I feel so untouched right now
Need you so much somehow
I can't forget you
I've gone crazy from the moment I met you

Untouched, untouched, untouched, untouched, untouched
Alalalala alalalala
Untouched
Alalalala alalalala

I feel so untouched
And I want you so much
That I just can't resist you
It's not enough to say that I miss you
I feel so untouched right now
Need you so much somehow
I can't forget you
I've gone crazy from the moment I met you

I feel so untouched
And I want you so much
That I just can't resist you
It's not enough to say that I miss you
I feel so untouched right now
Need you so much somehow
I can't forget you
I've gone crazy from the moment I met you

Untouched, untouched, untouched

--The Veronicas.

Rag Doll - Baby Won't You Do Me Like You Done Before...

I was dying near the end of my Spin class today with one last long sprint at top speed to do and absolutely nothing left in me. I love the camaraderie of Spin; if you get the right group, it's like your own little peloton of riders working our way up some long hill. The riders out front pushing as hard as they can then dropping back to the rear of the group, and everyone cycling forward to the front of the peleton like that until their own time to lead comes up.

Can you tell I like cycling?

Anyway, the guy next to me sees me flagging and tells me to plug into his IPod. I'll try anything at this point. He's blasting Aerosmith. Absolutely perfect. Especially this one. Forgot all about how tired I was. Today, I could have run down Lance Armstrong. (Okay, maybe not...lol)

Watch the video here. Can't believe I was SIX when this song came out.

(Chorus:)
Rag Doll livin' in a movie
Hot tramp Daddy's little cutie
You're so fine they'll never see ya leavin' by the back door, mam
Hot time get it while it's easy
Don't mind come on up and see me
Rag Doll baby won't you do me like you done before

I'm feelin' like a bad boy
Mm juicy like a bad boy
I'm rippin' up a Rag Doll
Like throwin' away an old toy
Some babe's talkin' real loud
Talkin' all about the new crowd
Try and tell me I'm an old dream
A new version of the old scene
Speak easy on the grape vine
Keep shufflin' in a shoe shine
Old tin lizzy do it till you're dizzy
Give it all ya got until you're put out of your misery

Rag Doll livin' in a movie
Hot tramp Daddy's little cutie
You're so fine they'll never see ya leavin' by the back door, mam
Hot time get it while it's easy
Don't mind come on up and see me
Rag Doll baby won't you do me like you done before

Yes I'm movin'
Yes I'm movin'
Get ready for the big time
Tap dancing on a land mine
Yes I'm movin'
Yes I'm movin'
Old tin lizzy do it till you're dizzy
Give it all ya got until you're put out of your misery

Rag Doll livin' in a movie
Hot tramp Daddy's little cutie
You're so fine they'll never see ya leavin' by the back door, mam
Hot time get it while it's easy
Don't mind come on up and see me
Rag Doll baby won't you do me baby won't you do me baby won't you do me like you done before

Yes I'm movin'
Yes I'm movin'
Get ready for the big time
Get crazy on the moon shine
Yes I'm movin'
I'm really movin'
Sloe Gin Fizzy, do it till you're dizzy
Give it all ya got until you're put out of your misery

Rag Doll livin' in a movie
Hot tramp Daddy's little cutie
You're so fine they'll never see ya leavin' by the back door, mam
Hot time get it while it's easy
Don't mind come on up and see me
Rag Doll baby won't you do me like you done before

Rag Doll livin' in a movie
Hot tramp Daddy's little cutie
You're so fine they'll never see ya leavin' by the back door, mam
Hot time get it while it's easy
Don't mind come on up and see me
Rag Doll baby won't you do me like you done before

Rag Doll by Aerosmith, from the 1987 album Permanent Vacation. This was the final single released in 1988. Written by Steven Tyler, Joe Perry, Jim Vallance and Holly Knight.

Beware the Facebook Koobface Virus

I'm not a big fan of these networking sites, but I do have pages on Facebook and LinkedIn and 1Up. By and large, they have been pretty free of nasty malware, but those days are apparently over.

The worst thing about this one is that it will come in the form of an email from someone you have already accepted as a friend.

Typically, the subject line reads like this: "You look so amazing and funny on our new video," but the text may vary.

Links you to a site that looks a little like YouTube and a typical video clip. But the video doesn't play and you are prompted to download an upgrade that will allow you to play the video. The download is the file with the malicious code.

Yeah, I know, one would think that you would have to be pretty out of it to follow all of those steps without having some alarm bells go off, but maybe the folks on Facebook are just a little too trusting. Either that or maybe we have come to a point where we are videotaping each other way too goddam much.

Like, for example, what the frack is up with all these female celebrities who are letting themselves get photographed and videotaped while they have sex?? Like my favorite actress, Kristin Davis.  

Ugh, girl. What the HELL were you thinking?

The guy tells you he just wants to have a video memory of this once in a lifetime experience, then uploads it onto You Tube...?

Okay, show of hands here, guys.

How many of you, if you A) actually got to have sex with Kristin Davis and B) she actually allowed you to shoot a video the event, would truly be able to keep it a secret from all of your male friends?

LIES!

Hmm, I think I may have figured out why so many people are opening these infected attachments.

Heh, maybe it's not the cheery "Oh, let's see how clever I look on this video' kind of motivation.

Maybe too many people can't exactly remember what they were doing when that videotape began to roll.

Maybe it's more along the lines of the 'Oh nooo, I was drunk, what the frack did I DO last night?' kind of motivation.

Powerful incentive. Meh.

You see, people, this is why we all need to leave the whole Missing Time thing to the Space Alien Abductees.

Nay, I won't be opening any attachments like this.

I've been drunk exactly once. It was the night I decided Roy could go to the Philippines for his research...for a year.

I made sure my two best Real Life friends were with me, Lisa and Frannie, and we all got sloshed. Can't remember anything else about that night, but I do know it was just three straight redheads and a big freaking headache the next morning.

No men allowed. And DEFINITELY no video.

Well, if there are too many nights you don't remember in your recent social activities, here's a link with more information.

Go here, if you have already been, umm, infected, uh ,digitally speaking, that is.

Be careful out there. :)

Want A Successful Economic Stimulus Package?

Then stop cutting checks for responsible adults, who are only going to do such, well, responsible things like catching up with bills for items that have already been purchased (no stimulus there), or buying essentials like gasoline and groceries. Trust me on this, oil companies plan their projects on extremely conservative estimates for the cost of oil, like between $45 to $55 a barrel. So, they are almost always making at least some profit, and usually raking in scandalous amounts of it. Stimulus is the LAST thing they need or deserve.

(THIS is what I'm listening to now.)

There is a better way. Just give all of the checks to computer geeks. I could not be more serious. Have you forgotten when one of those economic stimulus checks coincided with the release of the Xbox 360? The geeks, patriotic Americans all whether they realized it or not, didn't even bother with the middleman action of first depositing their checks in a bank. No, they took their checks directly to Best Buy, and walked out of the store with their new game consoles on the same day.

THAT, my friends, is economic stimulus.

And today, flushed with the knowledge that none other than Edward Leamer, director of the UCLA Anderson School of Business Economic Forecast, has said that the worst thing U.S. consumers can do this Christmas is to stop buying en masse, I have now done my bit for the moribund American economy. I sat down to my computer and laid out some serious green for new hardware.

Irresponsible of me? Phhtt. Hardly. I'm richer this year by roughly $125k, thanks to what my dear old mum left us when she died. The vast majority of it is safely and responsibly earning interest in Depression proof accounts.

And I didn't go overboard. For less than half of the price of a single, stupidly over-configured glam computer, like a Reactor Extreme (see yesterday's post), I've managed to fulfill my little family's hardware needs with casual gaming quality to hardcore gaming quality gear through new purchases and upgrades.

Here's what I did.

Goal: no frills laptop computer for Roy with a large screen, spacious keyboard and decent storage for use on his research trips.

Answer: Acer Aspire 5315-2940 Notebook. Intel Celeron M Processor 540 (1MB L2 cache, 1.86GHz, 533MHz FSB), 1GB DDR2 667 SDRAM, 80GB hard drive, Integrated CD-RW/DVD-ROM combo drive TFT Display: 15.4" WXGA (1280 x 800), Acer CrystalBrite Technology, Integrated Intel Graphics Media Accelerator X3100, 802.11b/g WLAN, 10/100 LAN, V.92 modem, Windows Vista Home Basic. Cost: $349.00. 

Acer makes truly dependable if slightly boring notebooks that have never given me a single technical problem. And the fact that you can get one with a full size keyboard and a 15.4" screen for the cost of a cramped little netbook is truly awesome.

And since Roy has been on the receiving end of some of the most wicked hack attacks I have ever encountered because his work ferreting out illegal toxic waste sites is always making him new and fun friendships (not!), this is a computer that can be easily replaced without kicking our insurance premiums through the roof.

Goal: Replacement for the last of my old servers, a Dual Opteron 244 with twin 1.79 GHz chips and a piddly Ati Radeon 9600 Pro video card. Sad to see this one go, as it was one of the two I ran as private servers for games like Battlefield 2. But Roy and Julian need a new desktop of their own to share that will be fast enough for casual gaming and big enough to store all of Julian's games and movies and all of Roy's files.

Answer: I'm seriously thinking about hosting a private server for City of Heroes and City of Villains (my in-game friends would get to play for free). But for now, we'll get a desktop that Roy and I will put together ourselves with the following components: ASUS P5N32-E SLI System motherboard. This is the same rock solid mobo that my current gaming rig is based on, only now it is quite inexpensive.

The SLI will allow an upgrade to a true hardcore gaming rig, should either Roy or Julian get really serious about their gaming. For now, it will hold a single NVIDIA GeForce 9500GT 1GB PCI-E graphics card.

The rest of the specs are as follows: Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 2.4GHz, 4GB DDR-II PC2-6400 800MHz RAM, 750GB SATA-II Hard Drive 7200RPM, 20x DVD+/-RW Drive, Cooler Master CM 690 Mid Tower Chassis, MS Windows XP Pro. Cost: $1,200. Total cost: $1,549.

Goal: My last mobile computer was an awesome Alienware notebook. Top of the line in every respect, except battery life, of course. And it was massively damaged in one of those aforementioned hack attacks against Roy, which is the reason for two changes: An El Cheapo mobile box for Roy, and he does not get to even BREATHE near the next notebook I buy. Since, I'm a mommy now, LAN partiers are few and far between, unless I'm hosting them. And I was a game design student in Florida when I got the Alienware.

So, my goals now are much more modest. A better than casual gaming mobile rig that can play my favorite MMORPG games in high resolution and fast frame rates, but will come in at less than half of the exorbitant cost of my Alienware. And since it really won't be leaving my house much, it can have a ridiculously huge screen capable of playing at higher resolutions than my gaming desktop.

Answer: Acer Aspire Gemstone Blue 8930G-6448. Acer? ACER? Not Alienware? Voodoo? Not even a Dell or Toshiba?

Yes, well, I'm older and wiser now at 26, and I need to justify my splurges even more now as a mother. And just because Acer is best known for Khaki style business class notebooks does not mean it can't step out in an Oscars quality gown when it wants to. This one is ready for the red carpet.

Windows Vista^® Ultimate; Intel® Core™2 Duo Processor T9400 (6MB cache, 2.53GHz, 1066MHz FSB); 4GB (2/2) DDR3 1066 SDRAM; 320GB hard drive; integrated Super-Multi drive; 6-in-1 card reader; Acer® CineCrystal 18.4" WUXGA (1920 x 1080) TFT LCD; NVIDIA® GeForce® 9700M GT graphics; 802.11a/b/g/Draft-N WLAN, Bluetooth®, gigabit LAN, V.92 modem, webcam; fingerprint reader.

Yes, that's right, a fingerprint reader, so no little gooey eight year old boy fingers are going to be turning this box on, and Roy's fingers won't work either. Just mine. Muy ha ha ha ha! 

The GeForce 9700M GT is not nearly as good as the top of the line mobile graphics card from NVIDIA, which is the 9800 series, but my days of playing the most demanding pc games, which are first person shooters and not standard MMORPGS, are largely over.

And yet it will run many of the most demanding games in 1920 x 1080 resolution. How good is that? I play my MMORPGS on my gaming rig in 1680 x 1020.

Once Acer makes this computer big enough to hold a large mobile video card like the 9800 series, it will be able to compete against anything.

But here is the best part about the Acer Aspire Gemstone Blue: the price. New Egg was selling it for $1,599, which is frankly an awesome deal. Total cost of our household hardware upgrade: $3,158 or less than $1,100 per computer so far.

We're almost done. Finally, there is my desktop gaming rig. When I bought it and benchmarked it more than a year ago, it tested as fast as many of the dream machines featured in my favorite computer magazine, which is Maximum PC - Minimum BS. It's specs were as follows: ASUS P5N32-E SLI mobo, ENERMAX 720-watt quadcore and SLI-ready Infiniti power supply, Intel Core 2 Quad Q6700 running at 2.66 GHz each, with 1066MHz 8Mb L2 cache, Windows XP professional's 64-bit edition, dual MSI NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTXs with 768 MB DDR3 video RAM each, 4 gigs of DDR2 800 OCZ Technology Gold GX XTC RAM, plus peripherals, all housed in a sleek, glossy, yet understated basic black Soprano RS 101 mid-tower chassis.

I think the true test of any personal gaming rig is to come back to it 12 months or 13 months later and decide what kind of upgrades it needs to still be among the fastest computers of the friends and acquaintances you play with.

Granted, my priorities have changed a LOT since November, 2007. Mom was still alive then, and Julian was my little step brother. Now, Mom is dead and Julian is my adopted son, so superfast rigs are less important to me now. Still, I've reviewed how my rig plays and haven't found a single major component that's worth changing. One really good test came from a buddy of mine from City of Heroes, who played with me a little from the Hero Con event this year on one of the primo rigs that was set up for the event.

We moved at exactly the same pace, loaded transition screens at exactly the same rate. That told me a lot. So, all my gaming rig is getting is a good cleaning, a really big hig from me, and a new 1 terabyte storage drive from Seagate to replace the two 250 Gb maxtor drives that failed over the past several months.

And now, we're done. Three new computers and one upgrade, for just $3,300.