Well, I really ought to talk about Brian. John called my new laptop Brian, you see. That was his big surprise, along with the fact it has the greatest hits of Steps on it. And worse than that, Shaggy's album. Eep.

Brian, then. Brian has a tiny pixel (I suppose by their very nature they're tiny, but hey) on his otherwise magnificent screen that never changes colour. This is a fault, I suppose. But somehow I'm beginning to think that it adds character. Now that Brian has a name, now he's been accepted into the family, I can't bring myself to complain about him. What if they took him away and destroyed him? I couldn't live with myself! ;-)

His specifications are as follows:
2GHz Pentium 4 processor
256MB DDR SDRAM
20Gb HD
DVD/CD-RW
32MB ATI mobility graphics card
Windows XP
etc.

He's a Medion. And he only cost £1199! Which I thought was good. Go ahead, shatter my illusions with cheaper laptops you've found online. See if I care. :-p

He came with some pretty good software, too. I particularly like PowerDVD. A strange thing to like, but you can see what I like doing in my spare time. Watching DVD's, obviously. I have that on this computer. (Yes, I'm not using Brian. John's playing with him.) But it has Works and Autoroute and Encarta. And other stuff.

And you know what else I've got to play with? A new digital camera. It doesn't have a name - let's face it, it'd be stupid to give a camera a name!

Its specs are as follows:
2.0 megapixels
6x optical zoom, 2.5x digital zoom
Internet conferencing
Movies (with sound)
Voice captioning
16MB Smartmedia card
1.8" LCD monitor

It's a Fuji FinePix 2800 Zoom. It cost £299 from PC World. I went there after work this evening. I had researched it over the weekend. It wasn't some strange impulse buy. It'd be hard to impulse buy in there - it takes them a million years to notice you want help! Anyway...

So I've spent lots of money. You know how I'm justifying all this expense? This stuff will be invaluable whilst undertaking my Professional Archaeological Practice MA. *grin*

Perhaps later I'll kidnap Brian and write some more of that Stargate fic. You know, the one I've been writing for years? I can write in bed now. So much more relaxing..!

BTW, I took a pic of me with the camera. All done with mirrors. :-)

In the sidebar. :-D