Spare Parts

First, the non-me news: Ars Technica has posted that the groovy new Sony PSP will be released in North America on March 24. The minutes of the most recent Mozilla staff meeting are online. And Avant Browser 10 build 121 is available for download. If you haven't tried Avant and still use Internet Explorer for any reason at all, go get Avant as a backup to Firefox right now. You do have Firefox, don't you?

I picked up a stripped-down old computer the other day for nearly nothing, along with a very nice used Philips 17" flat-screen CRT to replace the 15" Compaq-branded .28dp monitor I've been using. The PC has no RAM and no optical drives at all. But it did have an old ATI 32MB Rage 6 PCI, which I immediately installed in this old Compaq. So now, along with the new monitor, I'm browsing at 1280x1024 (32-bit), instead of 1024x768, and I'm playing Half-Life (and Blue Shift and Opposing Force) at 800x600 in OpenGL mode at 60fps, as opposed to 320x240, software rendered at 30fps. But I don't want to strip down this old box entirely just yet, because it has two hard drives, a 30GB and a 40GB WD, and I'd like to see what's on 'em first.

Our former neighbors, who are moving to Kentucky after their house was foreclosed upon, finally agreed that we should keep their adopted former-stray rottweiler Maggie. We've been taking care of her for so long that nothing will really change. She'll continue to sleep in our yard (or house, when it's below 35 or above 85 at night), play with our other dog (Lucy the Jack Russell/mini pinscher mix), chew up our stuff (shoes, towels, furniture, etc.), and eat the food we've been buying for her (mostly Pedigree, with Alpo thrown in for variety). But it'll be nice to have the added insurance of a rott in the backyard to keep an eye on the place, assuming she hasn't managed to force her way through the fence into someone else's yard yet again.