Why certainly,
click if you wish.
Vleeptron would sincerely like to thank all of you -- Abbas, PatfromCH, Jim, Steve -- for your excellent and valuable advice about what kind of new computer system I should buy.
I also consulted my psycho teenage criminal friends on Undernet IRC and they told me what the hottest laptops and iPhones to steal and shoplift are this year. (Fortunately most of them seem to have moms and dads who keep them out of jail, but certainly aren't happy about it.)
I came THIS CLOSE to putting my $$$$$$$$ down on that sexy ridiculous Maserati monster computer at the top -- it's called the XPS 720 Red Extreme Gamer, and I would have been the envy of every 12-year-old boy in the Universe.
THIS CLOSE.
But I made the Fatal Mistake of dragging a professional computer consultant -- the guys who have been keeping my dying piece-o-crap HP on Life Support for the last 3 years -- into it, and for the most sensible and realistic and practical reasons, he talked me out of the lurid Fantasie Drool Machine from Outer Space Tomorrow, and sold me The Yawn-o-Tronic 7000 (below).
It was like getting ready to climb aboard a Triumph Bonneville 750 Dual-Carburetor motorcycle (the stencil on the front forks said "World's Fastest Production Motorcycle," but I can't swear to that, I only got it up to 105 mph/169 kph one time) and kick the starter -- but buying a Toyota hybrid minivan instead. My heart is broken.
Now I'll be the envy of every real estate, insurance and accounting agency, dentist, and medium-sized Protestant church in North America.
But I'll be able to sleep worry-free at night for the next 5 years.
And my Yawn-o-Tronic has a metric shitload (= 0.883 English shitload) of wholly unecessary Punch and Power for the Weird Things I like to do with my computer. (I like to kill gnats with thermonuclear bombs.)
Actually I'm going to join the Dutch Power Cows and Fold Proteins like nobody's business. I am going to power ON this sucker and never turn it off again. I'm going to get STATS! STATS! Vleeptron Dude is going to become a Mega-Star in Intergalactic Distributed Computing.
And write code. Number Theory stuff mostly, I guess. Maybe take a whack at an odd game. I hate playing computer games, but I love the challenge of inventing and writing them. This is going to be a really super programming development platform. Who sells a LisP package?
Be happy for me. In a mighty struggle between my Inner Sixties Nudist Anarchist Hippie and my Inner Calvinist, Sensible and Responsible have triumphed. For the next five years, I will have no digital regrets or remorse or shame whatsoever.
I wanted to run away to Las Vegas with a big bag of cocaine, a 5-liter bottle of tequila, and Vivika and Tifani the identical twin redheaded freckled cheerleaders ... but I got sensible and acted my age, and will be happily sitting in front of the fireplace with the wife and cats listening to Bing Crosby singing Christmas carols and sipping cocoa instead.
"Of all our regrets,
the coldest and most empty
are of temptations
we have successfully resisted."
-- James Branch Cabell
But when nobody was looking, I shoved a Lot Of Wicked Fun inside my new Yawn-o-Tronic 7000. You just can't tell from the outside. From the outside, it just looks like a computer.
(Actually they're not identical, they're fraternal. Their freckle patterns are different.)
