Se7en, No, wait, just Seven. Sorry miss Paltrow

Before I go off on windows 7, let me tell you about The Day Of Seven.

Seven what? Seven tiny pairs of pants. Seven tiny pairs of panties. (If they're called pairs, and there was 7 of each, maybe I should call it The Day Of Twenty-Eight... but that doesn't have as nice of a ring to it...)

Kiddo's knee deep in potty training. some days she's into it, and runs with a song and a dance to ye potty, whether she's made it in time or not! One day she did it all herself, including wiping herself from a #2!.... badly. Baby wipes also work on walls, FYI. But she tried her best. The listerine on the floor was my bad, although I have others to lay SOME blame on.

The Day Of Seven was not a day of effort on her part, nor enthusiasm. It was a day of denial. "You need to go potty?" I ask many times through the day, if only to put the notion in her head- to help her pay attention to her body a bit. "No." I heard in reply many times on The Day Of Seven. Most of the time, she was right.

A 'yes' would end up in an honest attempt by her on the potty, OCCASIONALLY with results. On The Day Of Seven, she performed admirably in the #2 department. Whether a successful #2, or a false alarm, I praised her efforts. alas, minutes later, she peed her pants. New panties, new pants, and often new socks. (The Day Of Forty Two? Oh my... 42... DON'T PANIC! We have a new washer and dryer!)

Some of these liquid mishaps happened under my care, some under the care of my mother, and the last one was saved for mommy when she got home. By that time, Caitlin and I were barely on speaking terms. We were both equally fed up with changings. I almost put her into a diaper at one point, but I held strong. 'Never fall back' in training once the commitment is made, they say, or you erode what they've learned.


SPEAKING OF ERODING WHAT'S BEEN LEARNED....

Welcome to Windows 7.

My old laptop, which was far from new when it came into my care, had been showing many signs of giving up the ghost. A smallish hard drive that occasionally liked to slide out the side, a CD drive that no longer read CDs (but read DVDs just fine) and a power cord that, by the end, required a finger held in just the right place, at just the right pressure to work. The most recent injury to the cord was right by the plug that goes into the laptop, making a repair difficult at best.

It was time to retire the old girl. We knew it was coming.

So now, I have a new machine. It's not top-end, but it's pretty dandy for what I need, and beats the crap out of the old one. It's been named "Minmay"

Why name a computer after robotech's vacuous, fickle, not-so-loyal, possibly incestuous idol singer? I honestly don't know. It's certainly not the lessons I want my computer to learn. One of the selling points of this machine was ATA drives, which are going out of style, but make installing windows XP much easier... in case I hated wondows 7... I was going to go in with an open mind. Guess what happened?

Yup. It's OK. My new machine has 3gigs of ram, which might help also., but it feels OK. It has a lot of behaviours that I don't like, but after some tweaking, I think I'm just going to have to adapt a bit. Heck, running windows XP, I always tweaked it until it looked and felt like windows 98, so I guess I just have to take a step forward. It's ****ing microsoft. Conform or die, kill me now.

Shush, linux. Linux and I have come to terms with things. My MS alternatives will have to remain in the browser, email and office arenas. (On that topic, check out FireFox, Thunderbird [if you hate outlook] and Openoffice all of em free and awesome.)

Aside from my old laptop, I also still had my old desktop, Moria, (which was SUPPOSED to be named after the ship on Farscape, which I later learnt was actually 'Moya'.)
My Moria is about 7 years old, and of all the machines that have been in this house, only one has exceeded her speed, by 0.1 Ghz. She's a 3 ghz, with every bell and whistle that was available at the time. She cost a lot. It was my one needless indulgence when the settlement from my injury came around. She also had the bulk to my files... baby photos, music, graphical resources... FIFTEEN DVDs later, I have everything I wanted backed up. To put that in other terms, since a single layer writable DVD holds roughly 5 CDs worth of data, that would be about 75 CDs of data. I didn't load ALL of that onto the new laptop... Much of it I only need now and then, so it remains archived. But this frees up Moria to go live with my mother, who was running a pretty sad machine. She now has the fastest under this roof*, even above my new laptop. Moria just didn't fit in my lap very well.
*my playstation 3 runs more cyles by far than anything else in the house, if I wanna be picky.

And since I bring up Moya, in a related story, Claudia Black is awesome.
Despite that she hasn't returned my calls about playing Regan Grier in the Lifehack movie. Speaking of which, it's time for me to leave another message on Joss Wheadon's answering machine.