Well, my computer died Saturday. My wife had just started using it (after I’d been hogging it all day, natch), when it suddenly just powered off. But it didn’t just power off, it also produced a hefty amount of that tell-tale scent, ozone. Mixed with something else… like maybe the scent of real smoke.

I’m hoping that it’s just the power supply, and that if I just replace that, maybe everything will be fine. But power supplies have a way of taking things with them sometimes if they go down hard. Also, some recent behavior has made me suspect that the mother board may not be quite up-to-par anymore, either. I may end up having to replace that as well. Perhaps I can salvage the CPU as well, though I’m sure that’s taken quite a beating too, as I was experiencing heating problems a month ago (solved with the purchase of a case fan with significantly more oomph!). Perhaps it’d be well to go with a more up-to-date motherboard/CPU combo… I don’t think I want to go 64-bit, though, as Shockwave Flash is known to have issues on 64-bit Linux systems. Guess I’ll be doing a little shopping soon.

I’ve been wanting to get a laptop, and maybe now I have a good excuse to get a basic, cheap, not-quite-modern-but-still-very-usable model; but lately Sara and the kids have been using the computer more and more, and I don’t want to deprive them of one. And if I had a laptop, I definitely wouldn’t be keen on letting the kids (four-year-old David in particular) go touching it and stuff.

Maybe if I can manage to get the desktop working again, with some semblance of reliability, with just a power supply replacement (fingers crossed!), I can transfer ownership of that to “the wife and kids,” and get myself a cheap laptop, and a wireless access point. That way, too, I can stop pacing my room back and forth when Sara or one of the kids is surfing noggin.com. 🙂

Well, I’ve been healthy for a week now; but last week marked the end of the most gruelling flu I’ve ever had; I missed over a week and a half of work. It started out mild enough, just a sore throat. Then for half of the next day, I was unable to speak in anything but a hoarse whisper. By the weekend (which was a three-day weekend, Memorial Day weekend), and on through the next week, I spent pretty much all day in bed, racked with full-body, energy-draining coughs. Coughs that felt like I was gonna eject a lung. And, yeah, constant nose-blowing. For Memorial Day weekend, I also had really annoying muscle aches, that absolutely prevented me from feeling any kind of comfortable.

I actually still have a little bit of that cough. In fact, this morning I had a bit of a coughing fit.

I don’t ever want to be that freaking sick, not ever again. Not even when I’m 75 and figure I have it coming. Guess if anything’s gonna motivate me to start eating right and exercising a bit, maybe this will, just to help keep from ever feeling that lousy again. I’m definitely going to take up vitamin C and D supplements (BTW, did you know about the recent studies that indicate that vitamin D reduces cancer risks in women by 60%? That’s twice as effective as quitting smoking! It also appears to be very effective for men as well), and I will be first in line for the next batch of flu vaccinations.