Counting out the beats.

Thanks to being in the right place at the right time and also being the first one to speak up and say yes to the general offer, I've got a new computer. It's my first desktop, and I'm dreading the new setup just as much as I'm excited about it.

Six to seven years of useful life is about what I've come to expect from laptops at this point. I bought my current one six years ago, give or take three weeks. While I could get at least another good year out of it, I'd rather retire it gently before any major issues arise. Let it go with dignity and some spark of life still there.

One thing I didn't anticipate that I'm suddenly very glad about my current set-up: because of the laptop's inherent limitations, I've kept the bulk of my media on a collection of external hard drives. It's made a couple of things in the last six years a little more difficult, and it's going to make a lot of things in the very near future much easier.

Tech crunch.

After wrestling with several components, after scraping some skin off my fingers, after finally figuring out all the wires and plugs, it turns out the new PC doesn't have wireless capabilities and is in fact asking me for an ethernet cable.

Every problem has a solution. The solution to this problem seems like it's some kind of additional ethernet-to-wifi adapter device, which I'm sure I can buy with minimal fuss once I figure out the specifics of what I really need instead of what looks shiny and appealing. And it's really frustrating and had me hanging up phone calls to people to express my abject anger at the whole situation rather than be talked to in a calm and patient tone because I was that far gone in my feelings which were made worse by what felt like them not hearing me.

So, tonight's going to be the unpleasant kind of research.