A long days journey into weekend

So how will you spend your glorious three-day weekend? I don't chafe, per se, when people ask that, given that I haven't any income if I don't work, so a prolonged period of slacking off does me little good. I always hope that while others are off doing their bit to stimulate the economy, I can do mine by answering the needs of their customers.

And so I shall. This fine weekend, while you gorge your pie hole on brats and, well, pie, I will be:

• Building a PC from scratch. I ordered a barebones kit for a client; its a quad-core, 4GB, half-terabyte behemoth in a very cool case. High-end video and sound... its pretty sweet, and fun to build.


• Setting up a laptop. A client accidentally destroyed his laptop, so he bought another and handed it right off to the professionals.


• Helping out the township. It appears that their router/firewall appliance bit the dust in that last storm. Their usual nerd being out of town for the 4^th, they called me. There is signal as far as the router, but no connectivity through it. Before they drop about $1200 on a new one, I'm going over Saturday to do a little more digging.


• Sunday, I'll drop off the new laptop to the happy client, an might pick up a couple of PCs that the owners would like cleaned, or if that is too expensive, scrapped. No problemo; I'll burn a DVD of their data and commit the rest to the briny deep.

I'm actually amassing quite a pile of scrap. I should take it in soon to recycle the metals. I enjoy being able to provide a proper burial for the PCs that finally go their resting place.

The other day, I met with some former co-workers. Of the four I keep in touch with, two haven't developed the intestinal fortitude to move on (Gary! Darren!) and two have gone on to better opportunities (Ronda! Keith!). There are enough positions out there that one needn't tolerate sketchy financials and dodgy management. No one stays on at a company for 30 years anymore; you seldom see people in white collar jobs standing still for more than three or four.

Change is a scary thing, but its better on your terms than theirs.