What in gods name am I doing up at 7:30 AM. Why was I up at 6 AM for that matter? As it stands, I'm now sitting in a small rectangular metal cube, barely six foot square. But this is what air travel has come to. And I'm not even on the plane yet.

Naturally, I need power. I found it in the form of an empty phone booth amidst a row of almost 16 phones at gate 14 in SFO. It's the day before the day before Christmas. The airport is crawling with gun toting secutiry personel. Those that don't carry guns feel you up, massaging your groin with long thin metal tubes. Most of these folks are immigrants, possibly of the same lineage as those the reactionaries would like to deport. None of them make much money.

The airline industry is one of the bell weather type industries. However, it's got a bit of an ego problem. For me, this became obvious when I noticed .aero. Who the hell wants a dot aero TLD? Worse yet, it's been voted into the warming tanks by ICANN, but it's not even begun to be implimented.

Is this the way of the Internet? The slow process of naming dragged out over several years; names given only to those who can muster the $50,000 admission fee? And even paying the fee means no guarentee of actually getting your own personal TLD. Unless you're a multi-billion dollar industry that accounts for nearly 1/10th of one percent of all the traffic on the web? Yes, a lot of people book flights online. Yes, many people find information on travel destinations on the internet. But does that mean that we need orbitz.aero?

It's a bitter arguement, one that's completely irrelivent to society. No matter how many TLD's we make, they'll never make one ounce of difference in the grand scheme of things.

The terminal around me bustles with the glee one would expect from toddlers on Saturday morning. The cartoons haven't started, though. Two sisters bounce around the phone booths in front of me. An asian lady, probably of Malaysian descent, flexes her legs by doing high steps. There's chitter all around me. And yet, it still doesn't feel like Christmas.

Perhaps this is because I'm not used to feeling anticipation for heading home. This is the first time I've ever felt a sense of excitement at the thought of heading back to jolly old Maryland. Land of white bread, and whiter faces. Where the beltway manages the lives of millions. And where my family sits knee deep in the swamps of the temperate rain forest that is the Eastern Shore.

The Eastern Shore of Maryland is a beast all unto itself. It's possibly the only place in the country where people still speak seriously of state succession. This is not some sort of desire harkening back to the carefree days of the civil war: it's a desire to stay the hell away from the Washington Baltimore complex.

But an East Maryland would screw everything up, wouldn't it? No perfect symtry of 50 states. No more "Second most populace state on the Eastern Sea board." Actually, Maryland probably isn't quite that filled with meatbags. But it seems as though it's been steadily growing for decades; much faster than those around it. There's a reason Virginia is so well networked. It's because the fat cats in DC need their bandwidth, and the folks in Maryland have wide open phone-line veins just waiting to be squated on by Bell Atlantic. Oops, I mean Verizon.

And with all this bandwidth down south, and the wonderful world of the Internet splayed open on a public table for all Marylanders to use, you'd think that the Delmarva Peninsula would be better connected. I'm sorry, that was presumptuous. You probably wouldn't think that, would you, you smug bastard.

But no, Delmarva, and the Eastern Shore in general, is not well connected. DSL finally made it to the local telecoms, but it quickly grew too big for its britches. Consequently, it costs nearly 8 times what it would anywhere else.

Cable modems, too, made it down to the little peninsula by the Bay, but they too were guilded truffles. For all of you who feared cable modems would make American's into passive viewers of the Internet, the local cable modem barrens on the Eastern Shore are making sure you're proved right. 1.5 megabit per second down. 28.8 dial-up up. Yikes. Imagine that. "Hang on, I have to wait for my cable modem to dial up. Damn, lines busy. uess I'll just watch these ads until I can get through..."

Well, they're not actually streaming ads yet. Yet.

It's an interesting commute, the San Francisco to Maryland jaunt. Nearly a 6 hour flight, and almost a twenty year trip through time. But it's not quite a trip back in time. It's more like a return to the normal. San Francisco and the Bay area are simply that far ahead. Everyone else (In Maryland, anyway) are traveling through normal time.

In case you hadn't noticed, I haven't written in a while. I've gone through longer dry spells, but this morning, I think it's all flooding out at once.

So, um, I got a new laptop. I'm just rambling now, so feel free to browse some other shit. But anyway, this thing ROCKS! I'm usually not one to brag about my equipment. This is usually because 90% of my equipment was found on a street corner, in a dumpster, or at the ACCRC. That's not entirely true. More like 99%. In fact, the only computer I ever paid money for (Newton doesn't count. It's a work of art.) Just began to die after I moved. Poor old Stanly Two. He was a Power Center 150 when I got him. Refurbished. Out fo the back of MacWorld. Srhieve Systems sold him to me, and they've remained a bare bottom competative priced mac distributor. But working at the ACCRC has taught me one thing: bottom feeding distributors get stuck with a lot of unsellable crap. Think Nino cases, laptop docks, and the like. Anyway, Stanley Two came with 16 megs of RAM, a 150 megahertz 604 processor, and a whopping 1 gigabyte hard drive. First thing I upgraded was my monitor, if I recall properly. Had to: my old Apple 15 inch color display was not multisync. Had to explot that meg of Vram!

So Stanley Two trucked along nicely. I added a second 2 gig hard drive. Then a four speed CD burner. Then I handed him to UPS to ship to San Francisco. And POW! Stanley no work any more. But UPS paid to fix him, and he was a happy camper once again. I won the Carmageddon Championship at MacWorld 1999 and got a brand spanking new Voodoo Two card for my troubles. Then I managed to hork a 240 megahertz 604e processor from my job at UCSF. Eventually, I landed at MacHome and Stanley found himself in posession of a voodoo 3 and all sorts of other goodies. By the time I made it to CGW I had enough dough to spring for the $200 18 gigabyte hard drive I'd been lusting after. Unfortunately, it was an SCA drive. A quick trip to what I believe was HMR found an adapter, however. Two of them, in fact. I needed Two just to get the damned thing plugged in.

But through it all, Stanley behaved beautifully. Oh, I got a 36 speed CD drive at Fry's somewhere along the line. Bored yet? Why are you still reading this garbage?

Well, I moved to my new place and Stanley done croaked. Well, the 18 gig hard drive croaked, more specifically. I don't know that I can get it up again. It's amazing it lasted as long as it did: never was screwed down, never ran on a high speed SCSI bus. Just plain old SCSI 1.

What's that you ask? Why was he called Stanley? Ah! A brilliant question, but one that will require much more extrapolation and useless verbiage.

When I entered my Sophmore year at Saint Andrews School, everyone else had a computer. I spent most of my time in other people's rooms begging to play this game or that, or simply watching as others played Civilization or X-Wing.

Of course, I never really knew what a computer could do. My first machine was an Atari ST 520 That my father had bought for work, and I got summarily laughed at for having on my desk Freshman year. This wasn't because it was slow, or old, or not compatable with everyone else's stuff. It was because the desk was too small for all the cables, controllers, doodads, and assorted other junk it required to run.

So, my Sophmore year, my parents got me a brand new LC III for my birthday. Best present I ever got. I knida knew I was getting it but it was still a glorious surprise. I ran that thing ragged! Played Escape Velocity to the hilt, at 1/4th the proper speed. Made the game into a real time space combat simmulator rather than an arcade game.

Junior year, I sold my soul to the devil and installed Times Two. The 80 meg hard drive went zooming up to 160 megs! I was over joyed! But I was also screwed. It behaved well after that, but steadily declined. Eventually, after upgrading from four to twelve megs of RAM, for the bargain price of $200, I had to dump the hard drive and use an extra 270 megabyte removable syquest drive my folks had.

But I had no disk! Away with me to the Boston University Computer store to dump $80 down the drain on a new one. Gads but they rape their own students.

Anyway, that LC III got me onto the Internet, and it got me everywhere I needed to go. I loved it. I named it Stanley Kubrick. And all the subfolders were named after his movies. Full Metal Jacket was utilities, A Clockwork Orange was Internet stuff. Lolita was always my System Folder. Other folders were created, and named after different movies, but these were the unchanging three.

When Stanley One finally became non-viable, I moved on to the Power Center 150. And after about a year of loyal service and constant upgrades, it was dubbed Stanley Two. It was finally worthy.

Now, after all these years of constant upgrading, diddling, and general computer-based TLC, I have found it necessary to move beyond Stanley. Stanley was my name for my number one. Even when Stanley Two sat unmoving as the cornerstone of my home network and Internet presence, I still called him Stanley. Sometimes, when no one was looking, I'd even give him a little kiss.

But my computers are plentiful now. i have more than I could ever use. I have G3's and Pentium II laptops. I have Palms, Psions, AS/400's, MIPS servers, SGI's, and Sparcs. I use so many different Macs on a daily basis that i get lost in directory structures I've mistaken for other directory structures. I'm in a constant state of updating and control panel setting. None of my machines are just right.

But, that's the price I pay. I still get what I need to get done done. I just do it on 7 different computers instead of simply one.

Which brings me back to this new fangled lapotop. Boy, if I weren't a sentimental man, I'd almost infer that this could be Stanley Three. But I don't want to say that. It might jinx it. Besides, this is a PC. Specifically, it's an IBM Thinkpad 570 with a 366 megahertz Pentium II processor, 128 megs of RAM, and two megs of VRAM. That's the only downfall: the graphics card. Oh, and it has no cd bay. No floppy bay either. But it weighs under 3 pounds, and runs like a champ. Except for the fact that it won't shutdown. It just restarts. I have to pull the battery and unplug the power. Not good.

Oh, and just as an aside, Anita has no idea what she's doing. Good editor. Bad Person for the job she now has. And that's my two cents.

Wow, lot of words.... more like my buck seventy five. I hope you didn't actually read all of this. T'would be an awful shame to waste so much precious time on something I won't even take the time to revise.