easier than writing by hand…

dammit goerge, quit trying to license our love life!

merry christmas to you my friend.  hopefully we’ll see each other sometime this year =)

i wrote this to a local radio program that was talking about seaonal work around this time of year, looking for funny or touching anecdotes. of course i sent it in 10 min before the end of the show, so it prolly never had a chance of getting aired. some of you prolly even know what i’m talking about.

A girl I was friends with in high school and college had a grandfather that owned a concrete and asphault contracting company in Arizona. One winter break, she hooked me up with a $7/hour job with his outfit for a few weeks. My first day on the job, I was running behind a pickup shagging cones at a street paving project and had only been on site for all of 10 minutes when Monica’s grandfather drives up in his LTD and tells me he has a job for me. We drove a few miles up the road to where they were tying re-bar to pour a bus ramp at a local school. When we got there, he took me to the crew leader, a mexican guy of epic stature and says, “Zane, this is Bear. Bear, Zane’s a college boy. I want you to work him so hard that he decides to stay in school and never want’s to come back to construction again.” The next two weeks, i tied re-bar, pulled mud (and a hamstring) and demonstrated with embarrasing frequency that I couldn’t hit a form spike with a 3-lbs hammer to save my life, or my thumbs.

Now I’m an engineer. Funny how that works.

le sigh!

because i’m avoiding working on my final paper for class today, and because i can’t game from work, i figured i’d grace the intarweb with a bit of long lost technology.

the guy who sits next to me finally bought himself a new computer.  boeing gets a 21% discount on dell products through the end of the year, and while i’m a born again mac convert who openly lusts after a new 17″ macbook pro, i still thought it might be a good idea to check out what dell has to offer.  i went to the laptops and XPS systems to see what dave ordered and then i saw this.

the SHOWSTOPPER!  LOL!

this is basically a 20.1 inch laptop.  that’s the same size screen as what i have here at work on my CAD station and it’s forkin huge.  we started talking about trying to take it on an airplane and how you would need a suitcase just to carry it.  anyways, that made me think of this thing

this was my computer for at least 9 years.  from grade school all the way through my highschool graduation.  very limiting in my gaming career.

this is a compaq portable.  the OG portable computer.  my parents actually owned 2 of these things, although i think one of them wasn’t actually a compaq.  this guy was top of the line with dual 5.25″ floppy disk drives, 128k of RAM, and an honest to god harddrive (which our otherone lacked.  had to boot off a dos disk).  it sold for $3590 in 1982.  couldn’t you buy a new car in 1982 for $3590?  like a ferrari or something?  no battery, but considering it weighed almost 30 lbs, who would want the extra weight?

as for the dell, you know, now that i think about it, how is that thing any better than a 20 inch imac at half the price?  same processor and virtually the same video card, the only difference is, the imac doesnt fold up.  huh.

is a new month. let’s see if i can stay off the wowcrack long enough to start being interesting again.

on that note, i checked my bank account this afternoon. i got paid by the company and paid the mortgage today. basically, i netted $34.01 this paycheck, which leaves me only one thing to say…

BOOYAH GRANDMA! that sucker’s going straight to college savings fund for our eventualy children! or is it going to the plasma TV fund? hmmmmm….