a vestige of thought...

I shouldn't complain. I'm very lucky to have a work computer at all. For the couple of weeks before I had "my own" computer at work, I hopped around to whichever computer wasn't in use at the moment and, when they were all in use, generally had nothing to do. So I'm grateful that I have one. That said, the computer I have stinks. It's a big Dell "laptop" that is much too big to be actually used on a lap (though it's handy for when I have to move desks). It has a really high screen resolution, which means everything is really tiny and reading is hard on the eyes. It is new enough to have a trackpad, but old enough that (for whatever reason) the manufacturers still felt it necessary to have one of those fuzzy dot mouse control things in the middle of the keyboard. The trackpad and the fuzzy dot both have to have their own set of buttons, so I have four mouse buttons where one would do. I am constantly hitting them on accident and causing uncool things to happen. I also have a real mouse, so I don't really need any of them. (As an aside, I really love the trackpad and *single* click button on my iBook. Two finger scrolling is possibly my favorite computer-y invention in the world.) Also, the 'h' key doesn't work. If I hit it as I normally would while typing, it doesn't work. But if I hit it hard enough to generate a response, I end up with four or five h's. The 'h' key also happens to be right next to the fuzzy mouse controller thing, so when I try to hit the key harder I often end up hitting the dot as well and, again, causing uncool things to happen. Finally, computer gets really hot right under the keyboard. This makes typing for long periods of time rather unpleasant. Fortunately, I have only five more eight hour chunks of sitting in front of that generally unlikable computer and then I get to go back to using my generally cool iBook all the time. Hooray!