Well, we ordered the laptop last night from www.ncix.com. I didn’t think to check if they had it in stock when I went to the checkout, and sure enough, they’re backordered. Still, with shipping, taxes, and an extra 256 megs of ram, it just broke the $2000 mark ($2010 or so) pretty good price, considering what we’re getting…So, basically I will have finally broken the 1 Ghz barrier, without having to add up the various machines in the house to get there :)

As a side project to that, we figured that if we were going to get a new machine, we might as well look at upgrading our MS Money 99 to a newer version. I went to the MS site, and saw that they have a demo for 2002 up - I immediately downloaded and installed it - wouldn’t you know it, it couldn’t convert our old data directly to 2002. I thought that it was complete crap that it wouldn’t, but I couldn’t get it to do the job. Well, we’ll try the latest version of Quicken then, it should be able to convert a MS Money file that’s three+ years old - Erin went out an bought Quicken 2002 - mistake, cause it doesn’t do ANY MS Money conversions. Seems silly to me - especially with their 60 day satisfaction guarantee :) I guess Quicken is going back. Anyways, when searching for a way to convert the Money 99 file to either quicken 2002, or Money 2002, I came across an article on the MS knowledgebase saying that Money 2002 (US) won’t convert older Canadian (or other international version) files properly - ie. each localized version of Money has it’s own format that doesn’t interoperate with the other ones (sorta) Basically all it means is that we have to buy the Canadian version of Money 2002 in order to get the Canadian version of 99’s data converted over… Unfortunately there’s no demo of the Canadian version, but from the looks of the American version, there’s enough new features to warrant an upgrade - when we’re getting a new computer anyways, it’s likely the easiest time to do it.

So, I’m kind of excited to get this laptop and start playing with it a little. It should be fun to have an up to date computer again - my old P200 isn’t exactly state of the art anymore. Plus, I get to play with Windows XP (which I’m looking forward to, despite some of the bad press) From the looks of things, it’s significantly different from win98/NT4, which are the Windows os’s that I’m used to.

Hey, my domain name is working now (www.nodecam.com) so now you can bookmark that site, and not have to worry about if I move it to a new server or something :) I’m going to set up one of those favicon.ico things so that I get a custom icon in the IE favorites lists and stuff. As an aside, I have set up email forwarding too, so you can reach me with [insertFunnyEmailAddressHere]@nodecam.com (everything gets forwarded to me, except erin@nodecam.com, which gets forwarded to Erin - though she doesn’t know it yet)

Simpsons quote of the day: “Son, when you participate in sporting events, it’s not whether you win or lose: it’s how drunk you get.”