Gee, you dangle technology in front of me and I get all gushy. The Thinking Blog is hosting a contest between now and Dec. 20. In exchange for posting about it, you get an entry in a drawing for (you can all sigh with me) a brand-new RuffBook Tech. It’s billed as a rugged, water-resistant laptop with a magnesium alloy casing. The descriptions are certainly impressive on the website — including the photos of a water-soaked laptop with mud piled on the keyboard.

Now that’s the kind of laptop that might survive even me. I’m hard on my computers — and laptops in particular. My old orange iBook endured through two keyboard replacements, spilled diet Cokes, the occasional drop (OK, more than occasional), and my constant use, with its screen getting darker and darker and the hard drive eventually grinding to a halt.

My current HP Pavilion ZD8000 has a frayed power cord that keeps popping loose from its connection to the computer (the plug-in end is kind of warped). Battery life is about 45 minutes if I’m lucky. The case is battle-scarred from being toted around so much, and the silver is worn off the corners of the plastic case. It’s been knocked off the couch by the cats and off the bed by me, and my kids have lugged it around in my carrying case as delicately as if they were handling, uh, bricks. The touch pad wore through to a green base in the first three months I had it, and eventually it widened and deepened to an oval clear spot showing the touchpad mechanisms beneath (kind of cool, actually). The heaviest-used keys have the letters worn off them. (Yeah, I’m at the keyboard a LOT.) No dead pixels on the screen yet, but it’s going on three years old and it’s just a matter of time now. 

And it looks like my laptop will have to last me, no matter what: My youngest daughter wants a computer of her own and at 10 she’s getting old enough and insistent enough that I’m having to share mine more than I like. (What a bad, bad geeky mom I am.) My oldest is going off to college next year and is in need of an upgrade from her old desktop system to a MacBook Pro for her graphic design studies. And I’m thinking that mine will just have to endure for another year or two since their needs are more acute than mine. Darn it!

Suffice to say that a rugged laptop was designed for ham-handed users like me — and the timing is perfect! So I hope to win. Until then, I’ll keep my fingers crossed … and the diet Cokes away from my keyboard. (*slurp, fizz*) Well, mostly.

If you read this web site via a feed aggregator (and I don’t blame you — that’s how I do most of MY surfing), please take a sec to visit the site and look at the new design. I picked a new WordPress theme (Feather Pen 1.0) and implemented it today. The old one was great; I loved all the blotchy red blood drops of Fractal Red, and it suited my site to a T. But it was the *graphics* I loved, not the typography. The problems were:

• The type was too small and I hated futzing around with the coding to fix it.
• The leading between lines was just too small, and the page looked crowded.
• I didn’t like the headline style; ditto on trying to fix it.
• I had trouble making the bullets line up right on unordered lists.
• I was ready for a change.*

*Girly moment: It’s like trying on new clothes just because you want to. Oh well. See how this new look suits you. I think it’s eminently more readable.

ARRGH UPDATE: I just realized that I deleted some coding. Trying to fix now.

WHEW UPDATE: Fixed. I think.

Technorati Tags: new WordPress theme, new blog design

Put down your diet Coke, and push the bowl of Chex Mix away from the keyboard. Are you ready? Good. Because I don’t want you to spray anything onto your keyboard or computer monitor when you read the hilarious Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About.

Oh, it’s cumulative. At first, it’s just mildly amusing. Then you’re grinning, more and more broadly. And pretty soon you’re snorting like a crazed hyena, wiping away tears of laugher and trying not to shake the bed so hard you wake up your husband, who’s already gone to sleep for the night instead of surfing the web like the amusement addict that you are.

You might call this funny Brit a less urbane Thurber, but whatever you call author Mil Millington, I can’t resist things like this:

• “Margret thinks I’m vain because … I use a mirror when I shave. During this argument in the bathroom - our fourth most popular location or arguments, it will delight and charm you to learn - Margret proved that shaving with a mirror could only be seen as outrageous narcissism by saying, ‘None of the other men I’ve been with,’ (my, but it’s all I can do to stop myself hugging her when she begins sentences like that) ‘None of the other men I’ve been with used a mirror to shave.’ ‘Ha! Difficult to check up on that, isn’t it? As all the other men you’ve been with can now only communicate by blinking their eyes!’ I said. Much later. When Margret had left the house.”
• “Margret simply cannot stop hanging things from every defenceless lampshade, rail or drawing pin-able piece of ceiling space. Mobiles built from small, wooden, peasant figures, baskets of plants or vegetables or toiletries, angular crystals or tiny, twirling shards of coloured glass, wind-chimes - oh, pale, waltzing Lord, the wind chimes.”
• (On the installation of a dreamcatcher over the bed) “Guess which one of us hung that up at some point on Friday, and which one of us walked into the bedroom sometime later and said, ‘Wow, that’s really good. I’ve often thought how not at all irritating it would be to have a bunch of feathers dangling just in front of my face all night, and I’ve also frequently been overcome with a sudden sadness that I had no means of a casual arm wave as I slept somehow entangling itself in ribbons and a suspended hoop so as to bring a halogen lamp crashing down onto my sleeping face. Yet, I’ve never thought of bringing the two together - now, that’s genius.’”

I’ll analyze the writing later, to figure out some of the pacing and phrasing that made this site glow with vibrancy for me. But for now, I’m such a convert that I do something I NEVER do — sign up for a mailing list to get more.

Because that site? It’s humor heroin.

P.S. Buy his books here. We really need to support authors like this. :o)