Yeah, it’s cool. I have a Pentium 4, hyper threaded 3Ghz CPU running Windows XP professional on a duel monitor system with a fancy black box with all sorts of red light bars on the face. The sides of the box are transparent so you can see the glowing blue and red fans spinning away to keep it all cool. Sitting on a shelf beside me I have 3 external hard drives that sort gigs and gigs of photos, data and video. Much of my software is a dead give-away of my computer geekdom. Yep I have Firefox to browse the web and WinAmp cranking out the tunes on my surround sound system with the big bass box thumping at my feet. As a graphic designer and web guy, I have all the fun editing programs as well; Flash, Photoshop, Image Ready, PS Premiere, Dreamweaver, Frontpage (now extinct), Propaganda for when I want to do podcasts, and a billion other little specialized audio and video editors and converters that get me through my day.

Now everything was going just swimmingly until I began to work getting all my PR video into my internal hard drive which only had a measly 4.6 gigs of space left. (Yeah I remember when 20mgs was a lot.) So off I ran to buy a fancy new SATA drive with 300 more gigs of space. That should let me get this video done. Well, if I was going to have a new faster drive I figured, I may as well move the OS. I can use the old drive as a scratch disk. Surprisingly I was easily able to ghost the old system to the new drive without playing too much inside my bios. (Ghosting basically means copy the old drive to the new one). Of course it was not until I got all that done that I realized that with my new 3CCD camera, I had to buy a new 4 pin to 6 pin firewire cable and a new internal firewire port! Ok then, no problem. One thing is sure, when my son, Julian, and I built my “Imperial Death Star” computer we made it to take a million upgrades and not sneeze. Now of course if I was really a geek I’d have a Mac.

The truth is, I hate the technical workings of computers. To me computers I like cars. I use them everyday but I’m not all that interested in looking under the hood. Just like a car of course, you often have no choice. So you learn.