First, the Bad News:

My laptop is still down, off somewhere on the West Coast, getting fixed (presumably) by the Tech Squad that services my extended warranty on this increasingly unreliable conglomeration of circuitry. And the warranty expires come December. At that point it won’t be cost-effective to subsidize some uber-geek’s sailboat or second vacation home so I’m about to slap a DNR on another machine with an average life-span of 3 to 4 years. (3 to 4 years minus the better part of an accumulated year for multiple resuscitation furloughs.)

Now, the Good News:

I’ve finally broken down and purchased a desktop machine. In the past I’ve chosen portability over stability, putting all of my eggs (not to mention files, documents, and software) into one basket.

No more.

Looking at the narrowing window of acquiring a Windows Vista / Windows 7 capable computer that was still XP compatible for all of my old/current software, I pounced. Already it’s close to impossible to find new machines that are driver capable of my peripherals and older programs.

I’ve just set it up and reconfigured it to dual boot both XP Pro and Vista Business. Now comes the lengthy process of reinstalling, configuring, downloading, updating, tweaking, and reorganizing my system—and synching it with my laptop when I finally get it back. We’re talking several more days, folks, but at least there’s a light at the end of the tunnel, now.

And 1,193 emails in my in-box (in addition to 264 folders in my Outlook Personal Folders subset)! In other words, catching up on my mail is going to take a bit longer.

Patience is not just a virtue, it’s a necessity…

WMS

Finally got to see ALL of the Battlestar Galactica finale. My DVR cut off before the final 9 minutes of the overlong Daybreak Part Two unwound. Thank the Lords of Cobol for Hulu.com.

So, now I’m left with a disturbing theory (beyond the idea that there’s a race of Centurions, somewhere out there, that have had another 150,000 years to evolve…).

It goes something like this:

The reimagined Battlestar Galactica with James Edward Olmos as Adama unwinds 150,000 years in the past. At the series end we flash forward to the here and now. The finale hints at the cyclical nature of events and how our present-day patterns are mirroring the events that led to the rebellion of the machine servitors and the fall of the 12 colonies. We close on a collage of robots that are developing toward bipedal and human-like designs…

If one follows the established time-lines for the BSG mythology…

Eddy-J commanded the original Galactica 150,000 years ago.

Lorne Green commanded another battlestar named Galactica some 150 millennia later at the end of a thousand-year war against a machine race believed to have been created by extinct reptilian aliens.

Thus the original BSG is the future series and the “reimagined” BSG is the “first” series.

My…head…hurts!


WMS

After trying various blogging tools and domains, I'm giving Live Journal a try.  So far it seems easier and more intuative than previous venues.  I'd like to be able to sync up with my sff.net newsgroup http://www.sff.net/people/wm.mark.simmons/blog.htm and my Amazon blog http://www.amazon.com/gp/blog/ABXWC3L0922EZ/ref=cm_blog_dp_artist_blog and my journals on MySpace  http://www.myspace.com/wmmarksimmons and Project: ShadowHQ http://projectshadow.ning.com/profile/WmMarkSimmons.

This is a short post as I am still configuring my site plus playing catch-up on an in-box with over 700 emails.  More on that shortly...