Thanks everyone for your kinds thoughts and sending good vibes. I was finally able to get some sleep instead of tossing and turning from the pain. Who knew nerves could hurt so much?

Anyway…the month is finally drawing to a close and since I got to eat home cooked meals for every single meal today, I’ll take it as a sign that the black clouds of doom have drifted off to some other place.

The main point of this post is to mention that I made a major purchase this month: a laptop computer. I bought a Thinkpad from Lenovo (IBM still holds a 6% stake in the company). From what I can tell with the UPS tracking number, the laptop got shipped from Hong Kong but I don’t think the machine was put together in Hong Kong. It was probably made in the Pearl River Delta of Guangdong province which is north of Hong Kong (via). It then wound up in Alaska and then got transported to Louisiana and finally made its way over to me.

A few months back when I decided to get a laptop I searched around to see if any laptops were manufactured in the U.S. I was hoping that in buying something that was made here I could pretend that the workers were paid something decent and worked in somewhat acceptable working conditions. I found that no laptops were manufactured in the U.S. The Panasonic Toughbook was the last laptop that had its manufacturing process shipped overseas and I couldn’t get a clear answer on where that was…China? Japan? Korea?

Then of course there is the issue of cost. Most of our computers over the years have  been put together from spare parts found either by picking through university students’ trash or buying it second hand. So I was a bit nervous of plunking down all this money for a laptop. The one I got was about $500 which is still alot of money for me.

The main reason to buy a laptop in addition to the low electric usage and limited space that a laptop takes was because my old desktop computer was dying. The motherboard finally died after moving all my data to my laptop earlier this month. As did my memory sticks, the hard drive…everything really. So its pretty good timing on my part considering when I bought the laptop.

In addition to the basic laptop I did buy one thing extra, a recycling service. For about $30 I can send my old computer (keyboard, mouse, monitor, chassis with stuff weighing no more than 69 lbs) to a place in New York State. From the agreement’s FAQ:

What happens to my equipment after I send it in?

Your equipment will be evaluated with respect to its age and technology and either recycled or disposed in an environmentally sound manner. Lenovo does not make any representations with respect to the recyclable content of your equipment

So that’s that. How will they "dispose" it? Will they melt the metal down? Will they melt the plastic down for reuse? The case I have is very beautiful and very roomy but my husband thinks its cursed so he is not going to use it…so I know that is one item that will have use for someone else. But what about the other components?

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On another (geeky) note, the laptop came with Windows Vista. Buying the laptop with XP would have cost more so I got Vista. I look at Vista for a few minutes and noticed that the big change is that everything got moved around so now all those XP certificate holders would have to get a new certificate so they know the exact placement of menu options and how it differs from XP. Its a nice little racket. I then downloaded a debian windows installer and installed debian. Found that the kernel didn’t have support for my wireless card and couldn’t install new kernel because boot was too small then couldn’t expand boot because I kept getting a kernal panic even though everything was fine and finally gave up and got me some eye candy in the form of Linux Mint. I love Linux Mint. Its debian based so I am still in familiar territory but its perty!  The default install is beautiful and everything is detected and I have a nice bootsplash screen. What more could I ask for?