Space Invaders Or What's The Buzz?

Yesterday evening I was on the phone with my mother when I heard an odd buzzing sound. It sounded rather like a drill that was losing torque as it bored into a hard material.
After looking around in confusion I spotted my cell phone on the bookshelf vibrating.
Today at work while writing up a document, there was an odd sensation coming from my left hip.
Once again it was my cell phone.
The latter call was my eye doctor’s office confirming my appointment on Tuesday.
The former was Stacy calling to let me know that they were in Ashburn and wanted to stop by so that they could pick up my old universal remote, which I’d promised to Scott, and to give me a card.
The card – along with a package of cookies – was a thank you from Vicki for my recent donation in support of her doing a “mathathon” to raise money for St. Jude’s.
I was also given a picture of Mike Wazowski from Monsters, Inc. which Scarlett had colored and decided to give to me, though I will say that she looked none too happy about turning her wishes into reality – that was one seriously grumpy face.


The items in question...except the cookies, which are long gone.

The fact that I am, by my own admission, reclusive and anti-social, often leads people to a misapprehension about me. Namely they think that they’re not welcome in my home, and that I view a visit as an invasion, making it a point to try to get in and out as quickly as possible.
It’s true; I don’t like people and I especially don’t like people invading my space.
But that’s people, not my friends. Sure, my friends actually are people, technically, but they’re not just any people, and I certainly don’t mind having company.
I mean, it’s not like it was some Mormons or some-err, never mind.
As it was, I probably kept them longer than they actually wanted to stay, as I was trying to find some particular comics to lend to Scott and discovered that they were literally in the last place I would look for them, or at least, the last place I did look for them.
Speaking of having company, this afternoon as I was preparing to shut down my computer and make my way out the door to start my long weekend, my boss came by, presumably to talk to me about something, but then he noticed that my cube neighbor, Melissa, who was walking by wasn’t wearing glasses, as she’d just gotten contacts. So they talked about that, and then someone else came over and joined the conversation, so I had this small group clustered around my cube, making it the place to be and effectively preventing me from not being there while they had a conversation that I couldn’t actually join, as they were talking about people I’ve never met or even heard of prior to that conversation.
That was an instance in which I would have preferred not to have visitors, though that had less to do with being reclusive and anti-social than it did with me wanting to start my damn weekend already.
I’ve continued to be happy with Hugin – my main computer – and its performance, despite the fact that it’s nearly three years old and therefore, by technology standards, ridiculously out of date. After all, even with Windows Vista, which pretty much every article, blog post, and forum comment I’ve read – many of them written by people who have never actually used it – assures me is a performance dog, it’s got a fair amount of zip and performs pretty much everything I ask of it without any major hiccups or delays.
(Much of that is, no doubt, due to the fact that it has 4 GB of RAM.)
In any case, the point is that I haven’t had any real thoughts about replacing it with a newer model.
In fact, my focus in that regard has been on buying a Media Center system to be the heart of my home theater, with nary a thought towards replacing the system on which I perform most of my computing tasks.
Then I read a review of this new system from Gateway with a quad-core processor and combo Blu-Ray/HD DVD drive that was optimized for things like video and image editing, and that sent my mind wandering along that particular path.
I spent much of yesterday morning at various Web sites configuring potential systems. I even went so far as to open an account with Dell, but ultimately decided to hold off for a while.
Today, however, I did end up buying a new monitor, as working on that big picture over the weekend had me wishing that I had more available screen real estate, and that if I bought it now it would be one less thing to buy when I do inevitably buy a new system.
For the curious, I bought this one, a 24” LCD with a resolution of 1920x1200.
Consider it a belated VD* present to myself.
(*It amuses me to refer to Valentine’s Day as VD. I’m a child.)