Raptop

I'm typing this as I recline in bed, which is itself a wasteland of sleeping dogs and as-yet unfolded laundry. My legs hurt considerably, which explains why I'm here and not outside doing something more productive. I believe that the numbness in my feet is starting to fade, which is good because it means the neuropathy is starting to heal, but bad because they're starting to hurt.

But nobody likes a whiner. I am typing this on my new laptop, which Jean got for me for my birthday. It's quite a nice thing, an HP Pavilion (sounds more like a tent than a computer, but what do I know?). Unusually for a laptop, it's large enough that I can actually type on it at a pretty decent clip, and the keyboard layout is close enough to my old keyboard I am not assaulted by a sense of alienness every time I reach for the backspace key (which I do a lot).

Getting it on the wireless network was not entirely easy. Jean's laptop has been on the wireless network for some time, but not terribly reliably, and when we tried to get mine to connect, nobody could connect. Mine never connected at all, even though all the diagnostic programs claimed that there was either A) nothing wrong, or B) something wrong that they couldn't diagnose.

Why is that always the way? Computer diagnostics are never helpful. Once I was compiling a huge program at work and all of a sudden got a strange message that went something like "Compiler Error #3004 - Other Error". Other Error. How useful.

But we got it working. It was a simple matter of using the right tools - what Mitch Hedberg would call "the toolkit, AKA wallet." Our wireless router was simply no good or fatally screwed up in configuration, because we replaced it with a Netgear router and everything started to work immediately. (I never could figure out how to change the LinkSys router to "mixed" mode and I suspect that was the problem, but the Netgear router made setting this option trivially easy. I'm all for trivially easy.)

So here I am, typing in bed. This, I think, is something the Romans would approve of. The Romans had a strong sense of virtue and duty and sometimes complained (perhaps too loudly) about the loss of the old Roman virtues of strength and dignity in a world gone soft and lazy, but I still think they would have approved. They did, after all, eat dinner lying down (sitting up to eat dinner was an act of almost penitential self-denial).

Tomorrow is my "I Didn't Die Of A Heart Attack Day" celebration. I don't know what I'll do. I don't feel very good, so I may just have a beer and a Percocet and take a nap. Maybe watch a Blu-ray movie on my new computer.

Age quod agis!