That was the day I truly became a nerd. The day I hugged my new computer. It was just about three years ago, and I had spent the morning trying to get the family's 486/33 with 8 megs of RAM to allow me to play a game I had downloaded (probably after six or seven failed tries) with the 14.4 modem using AOL, which took almost a minute to open on that computer. I was fed up.

I went out to Computer City with my mother and my sister, not intending to actually BUY a computer that day. But when I saw the "Fashionable Black Acer" I was hooked. I knew nothing about Acers, except that this computer looked cool, was a Pentium 133! My god! And it had a whopping 16 megs of RAM! Could you believe it! The modem was a 28.8! Twice as fast! Imagine! The hard drive was a 1.6 GIG drive! I didn't even know what a gig was but I knew it surpassed the 540 megs the family computer was choking on daily.

I had to have it. I had the money...I'd been saving and saving for just such a computer...a 'better than the toaster' computer. I needed it. I could wait no longer.

I bought the Cool Black Acer, and the awesomely amazingly cool monitor with the built in speakers. I took them home and stuck the receipt on the fridge, the number so close to $3000 I was weak in my knees having spent it. I cleared a space on my desk to set up the new wonder machine and I was playing by the end of the evening.

I was blown away by the speed of my new wonder machine. A whole hundred megahertz faster than that coffeemaker we used before! And mine, all mine! Mine to play with colors and backgrounds. Mine to delete nasty ugly crap from the hard drive. Mine to line up my icons in nice lines. But it had Windows 95. I was used to Windows 3.1. I needed to learn.

And learn I did. Quickly. At first I was displeased with this new system. Where's my file manager? Where's my dos prompt? Where the hell is Taipei?

But I coped. I learned that by typing "Winfile" at the "run" prompt you could resurrect File Manager. The dos prompt had it's own little icon in the Start Menu. But alas...Taipei could not be found.

I held a short memorial and moved on.

I think I still have the receipt, but I outgrew my Pentium 133 a while ago. I built my own computer with all I had learned over the three years of keeping that Acer running. I loved my Acer for the longest time. It was my computer. The most expensive thing I had ever owned. It still is actually, since my new computer, Artemis, cost less than half of what the Acer did. But I still use the cool black monitor with the build in speakers.

Damn these are nice speakers.

Oh, and the picture shows that I do have a nice ass. ;) But you could start a fire with that arm....