Cat’s still got my tongue

Last updated on: May 7, 2013 at 6:41 pm by Svend White

Cat’s still got my tongue 2013-05-07T18:41:42-05:00 Svend White

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Sometimes, life can be so cruel. Am still sans a laptop or home desktop and work’s keeping me hopping during the day, so it’s a little difficult to blog at the moment.

I’m hoping to have this intolerable situation–my wings have truly been clipped–sorted out soon.

Part of this delay stems from my pickiness about computers. Don’t want to waste money on something cheap that I’ll just end up outgrowing in the near future.

I could probably get a desktop for home pretty cheapily through
CraigsList, but I don’t want to buy something temporarily and I want to
get a Linux workhorse for home, but haven’t had the time to research
the what deals are out there for pre-installed Linux PCs and OS-less
PCs (I can’t just buy a PC with Windows, as then I’d be paying $100 for
an OS that I’m going to erase anyway; that defeats the whole purpose of
the exercise).

A bit of elitism may also be at work. Though I rarely code anything these days, I still think like a programmer when it comes to PCs, obsessing about performance, hardware expansion options, etc. For example, though I realize that a reasonably recent Dell Inspiron would most likely meet all my needs, the techno-snob power-user in me refuses to countenance settling for a "consumer" product line, even if it’s from Dell. You see, like the stereotypical manly man with his powertools, as a techie I "need" a business user machine, like the Dell Latitude or an IBM ThinkPad. And I sniff derisively at the merest mention of the Sony Vaio, though I realize it would be perfectly acceptable for most purposes.

It’s sort of like how suburban yuppies whose lives rarely stray more than a few minutes drive from a Starbucks cafe insist on getting monster truck-style SUVs instead of sensible station wagons or mini-vans. The worst they’re likely to encounter on their daily excursions for a double espresso machiatto with free-range soy milk is the occasional pothole, yet they must have a vehicle that could take them to the summit of Mount Kilamanjaro.

Except that in my case, the extravagance is totally justified. I’m holding out and scrimping for an overpriced high-end laptop worthy of Bill Gates because, like the commercial says, "I’m worth it." And because I am a SlashDot reader.

In the meantime, I’m suffering the agonizing pangs of Internet withdrawal. If you hear of a wide-eyed, twitching man with a bulging satchel of printouts of painfully dry articles on religion and philosophy being apprehended during a botched lunchhour holdup of MicroCenter, you’ll know that I finally succombed to the Hunger and decided to go out swinging. Hopefully, it won’t come to that, though.

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