I bought the computer and assorted accoutrements on Saturday, put the desk together Saturday night, installed Debian on Sunday, and replaced Debian with Windows XP on Sunday night. Last night (Monday night), I started throwing out empty boxes and tried to reorganize my room. I was partly successful.

The opposite side of the bed from where I sleep has stacks of CDs, books, folded clean clothing and other assorted junk. I'm putting each stack away as I find the time to do so.

Somewhere along the way, I pushed the power button on this PC a little too hard and it was stuck in the on position. I popped open the case, stuck my finger in and found that I'd pushed the "punch-out" piece that was holding the switch in place. Okay, so I never said I was brilliant. I removed the remainder of that little strip of aluminum and shoved a wad of duct tape in the slot and secured it down. The power button problem was solved.

I just finished putting extra loose cables of all sorts into an empty box, while I was waiting for some file copying to finish. I was transferring files from the laptop's hard drive to this one using a crossover cable. It took me an hour to set up the network connection — the last time I did that was over five years ago and I forgot that I had to add the NetBIOS-compatible protocol to the network connection. Duh. I'm not finished, but I'm tired of doing it right now. I'll probably finish tonight.

My laptop computer is sitting on a homemade desk that one of my brothers-in-law made when I first moved into the house. I think the wood is older than I am because I'm starting to see some rot on it. Of course, the constant high humidity here has a lot to do with that. Anyway, it gets relegated to the storage area below the driveway when I get done transferring files.

I have a multimedia keyboard, generic of course, with a driver disk. The driver disk is a 3.5 inch floppy disk. I don't have a floppy drive exposed on this PC even though Windows Explorer says I have one. I didn't look when I had the case open. The sales dude at the store had it listed on the inventory, but I didn't look back then either. I never expected to need the floppy drive. Who uses them nowadays? Can you still buy blank floppies and are they any cheaper than blank CDs? Don't bother to answer, the questions were rhetorical.

Stepping over into another topic, my DSL connection is still crapping out on me on daily basis. No, not daily. There are days here and there where the computer remains connected, but never consecutively. I think the technicians at the source made a mistake anyway. My download speed is supposed to top out at 768 kbps, but it tops out at about 1500 kbps when I have a connection. The distance of my house from the CO is too far to maintain that speed over the telephone line. Oh well, it doesn't matter now. I'm planning to switch to Globe broadband (wireless) in January. One of my neighbors, Joel, is using their service and gets 3 mbps for 2000 pesos per month. I pay 2500 for a lot less and a lot of disconnection time.

The problem I'm having is not necessarily the problem with the connection, but the problem of communicating with the Subictel technical service reps and making them understand that the problem is on their end. They blame it on the power, bad grounding and just about everything else and won't even check their own equipment. I'm willing to bet if they adjusted the signal to the correct specifications that the connectivity problem would go away. Oh well, I'll get better service from someone else in January. In the meantime, since my contract for the DSL expires at the end of December, I'll just have to suck it up.