I was quite surprised to have received my federal tax refund yesterday in the mail... It came a little quicker than I had anticipated!

Initially, I was planning on using the check, along with my state refund, to purchase a new couch, but had to get a new laptop a couple of weeks ago. As a result, most of the funds will likely go into paying the Credit Card off.

Or never, know, I may just change my mind and get the couch. It's desperately needed, that's for sure. ;)

Amidst waiting for the new episode of The Office tonight... I thought I'd just share a few reasons why my laptop is a piece of trash.

1_ I now have 5 dead columns of pixels that span the left side of my monitor. This often makes it difficult to type and read text, as the dead pixels hide characters on the screen. It's annoying!

2_ The lid has multiple cracks on the hinges. One of these times, I feel that I'm going to either close or open the laptop and the entire monitor is going to pull right off. It really isn't a question if it will happen, it's when... ;)

3_ I get blue horizontal lines as graphic feedback on the screen. I think this is directly-related to the dead pixels and is likely a problem with the internal signal ribbon. The only way I can get it to stop is to play around with the alignment and angle that the monitor is sitting. Again, very annoying...

4_ At random times my hard-drive will begin chattering and when checking my system resources I have 1 or 2 services hogging about 100 MB or more of RAM. I have no idea what they are and once, when I tried to shut down the service, the damn thing shut down on me and I got the blue-screen of death twice when restarting. After restarting in safe-mode and restarting once again, it finally booted properly.

5_ The fan runs constantly... which is a side-effect of poor ventilation. The thing probably needs a thorough cleaning with some compressed air, but for the life of me, I can not get this god-damn thing open. Believe me. I've tried 3 times. Unless there is some rogue screw I'm missing somewhere, the only way to get it open would be to break some plastic.

6_ It weighs approximately 5 pounds. That's more than 3 times what laptops these days measure.

7_ It refuses to run Google Earth and Virtual Earth at the same time. The graphics card memory sucks ass...

8_ While on the subject of the Graphics Card... It doesn't support shading - which renders GRLevel-3's smoothing function useless. In addition, with the sucky, shared memory between the board and Graphics Card, it won't even draw county boundaries half the time.

9_ It's 8 years old - which, inherently, means it needs replaced!

By the way, I don't know if I've said so, but this laptop is a piece of shit. For the past year or so, I've been experiencing some problems with this thing shutting off on its own. When it first began, I had serious concerns, because it wasn't long after I had reloaded it (new OS install). However, I quickly found out it wasn't related to the reload at all. The thing was overheating and would shut down. It didn't matter if I had it setting on the floor or in my lap, the thing would shut down! Damn, has it been a major pain in my ass.

Well, since moving up here to Grand Forks, I've had continuing problems. However, since purchasing a computer desk a couple months ago, it had stopped occurring. Tonight, while "battling" with my brother-in-law in WarCraft III the friggin' thing starting doing it again! Three god-damned times...! What an F'in piece of shit!

While I was hoping to save up some of my own money and some christmas money for a digital camera, I may decide to spend that on a new laptop! While I would absolutely love to get my hands on the new Canon Digital Rebel XT, a new laptop may be a more sensible purchase. Sitting here and typing this out and checking my eMail since my last reboot, it hasn't shut down once. I don't know, maybe it has something to do with that game running. I guess, looking back at it, most of the times the frickin' thing has shutoff on me, I've been playing WarCraft III. Maybe it has something to do with the graphics card or the CD-ROM. I am required to have the CD in to play, so that would make sense. Either way, it's annoying as hell...

Besides that, my weekend off has gone fairly well. I went out and bought Season 10 of Friends and the DVD from the Final Episode, Friday night after work. The Season 10 DVDs were released near the beginning of the month and I've been aiming to get it to complete the set. I haven't watched them yet, but that may just change here soon!

Anyhow, I suppose I should get to bed! I've gotta be up for some NFL action tomorrow afternoon! The Colts don't play until Monday night, but of course, I gotta follow my fantasy players! Speaking of which, I've lost 3 weeks in a row now... Blah! I'm in desperate need of a win this week, if I want to remain in a playoff run in the league. I'm tied for 3rd place with 4 other teams with a 6-5 head-to-head record thus far. My hockey fantasy team is still sitting in first place, though! How so, I have no idea. Especially given the fact I hardly know a thing about the sport. The top spot actually has been teetering back and forth between me and another guy in the league, but so far, I think I've remained atop most of the time. Simon Gagne is having a great season for me so far... and I've got 4 players on my team with 12 or more goals and 9 players with 12 or more assists. I just hope they can keep the stats up throughout the season!

Take care and goodnight, folks...