I've been having an inordinate amount of fun lately - the weather's (slightly) cooler, there are fun things to do around town, and friends have come a-visiting. Some highlights:

- Hiking around fabulously awesome places like Tonto Natural Bridge, Sedona's Oak Creek Canyon, South Mountain, and Camelback Mountain.

- Checking out a kick-ass local ( Read more... )

After much deliberation and lip-pursing at the electronics mart, I finally settled on a shiny new Averatec laptop. (I know, I've never heard of it either.) However, it has a 15" monitor, 80 gig harddrive, memory card reader, and an AMD Sempron processor. More importantly, it was the cheapest acceptable laptop in the store ( Read more... )

So my laptop's been acting strange for a few months now. After a few minutes to an hour of using it, the screen goes into what I called the "disco display of death" -- the computer freezes and a kaleidoscopic display of pixelated colors dance across the screen. Recently, not only is it freaking out and freezing, but now it suddenly and ( Read more... )