(no subject)

My nephew is doing better than he'd been, thankfully. He's still kinda surly (he's three and people've been sticking him with needles and shoving things into places unaccustomed to shoving, you'd be surly too), but I got him to laugh for a good ten minutes straight yesterday. Mostly by picking up his stuffed dinosaur and channeling Frank Welker for all I was worth- specifically, his performance as Slimer, which is to say a lot of Inarticulate Gibbly Noises That Vaguely Resemble Speech. He thought that was great and kept playing with the dinosaur with his feet. Mom says that was really good for his lungs, and probably more motion than he'd displayed since the day after his surgery, total.

No, I will not reprise any other Frank Welker roles the next time I visit him. I don't sound like cartoon Ray and I would never be able to explain why the dinosaur was ordering the baby jaguar and the Thomas the Tank Engine balloon to build a harmonic plasma phase cannon out of meatballs and cranberry juice.

The apartment's still a pit and badly in need of vacuuming, but I got rid of the worst stuff and made the couch a viable sitting/sleeping option again. So there's that. Also I need to get new kitty litter, because the boys are at the end of theirs.

And it's snowing outside like the planet just got the memo about it being winter last night and it's trying to make up for lost time.

For batyatoon

I believe I got this from incandescens. Does this sound like anybody we know?

(John M Ford) Creators of GURPS ESPIONAGE/LOW-TECH:
"Hear good, 001. This am wheel. We just invent wheel in A Branch. Try bring wheel back still round. Not treat like pointed stick."
"What this, A?"
"That fire, 001. Let alone!"
---
"You expect Bog use language?"
"No, Bog. Me expect you fall off rock."

(no subject)

I bought a laptop last week at Best Buy. $650. Toshiba Satellite. Nice machine, good processor, good RAM, 17-inch widescreen. Fun, right? Slight problem: it runs Vista.

Now, I'm an XP person. I've been XP for a while. I know that eventually we're going to have to adapt to using Vista in the office, but until MS gives us no choice, that ain't happening. I'm currently torn: do I leave the laptop as it is and attempt to learn Vista through use, or do I format it down to the particulate storage level and install XP and all the necessary drivers? Has anyone had to do the wipe-and-change OS shuffle? Can you offer any advice on how to do so with a minimum of trouble?

(For those of you who wonder about such things, the laptop's name is Dion. Not for the lead singer of the Belmonts. For this Dion- specifically, because this computer might or might not end up being reformatted and getting an identity change.)