I apologize for the outage, and I’m afraid I’m going to have to either purchase a new PC (or Mac, not sure yet), but I will at least try to get some content flowing today from my Ubuntu Linux laptop.
If you don’t care about technical gobbledy-goop, you can go ahead and move along to something else.
So for the past few days, the poor thing has been dying from what appears (but cannot yet be confirmed as) a Video card problem.  I am going to try swapping some things around today to see what happens, but I’m not hopeful.  The worst part is that the problem is not immediate… sometimes the system appears to crash immediately, sometimes it waits for minutes or hours.  And I’m not always getting a dump.  The first time it happened, Microsloth reported to me that it was a video driver problem… mind you, the only things that have changed in the past 2 weeks are that 1) I added the Google Desktop Sidebar and 2) Microsloth came out with a critical security update.  That, of course, doesn’t mean the problem isn’t with the hardware itself, but this started within 24 hours of the MS update.  The interesting part is that I installed the most recent drivers from ATI about 6 months ago, and after all this started I did a Windows Update (like a good little child) and there on the list was the “most current” ATI driver, dated 2004.  I haven’t had a chance to check into that with ATI yet (it has been a little busy here in Readerville lately).
Anyhow, we’ll swap video cards around first, and if that doesn’t solve it (it really should, considering I’ll use a different driver and all) then I’ll probably be running out and making a new purchase (argh!).  The best part is that the current equipment just fell off of warranty, and frankly I’m not in the mood to learn ANY new OS, whether it’s Mac’s or Vista.  Just not right now (did I mention it’s busy around here?).

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