In late November, seeing a need for portable computing capability, I placed an order for a new notebook.

Basically, work was ramping up. Working at home is great, but sometimes you've just got to get out of the house. If you put in enough hours working and then don't go out in the evening, you can run a whole week without stepping foot out of the house. As a matter of fact, I haven't put gas in my car in a month. (Although I will admit that we usually take Berta's car out when we go out for family trips.)

In any case, my desire was to take a PC to the Starbucks or some other WiFi-enabled location, turn on, and work for an hour or two in a different locale. I looked over my notebook options.

Notebook number one was an older, but ahead of its age, Fujitsu P2120. The reason I bought it was, in my opinon, very forward-thinking. It was small - about as small as you could get at the time and still have an internal removable optical drive. It also had excellent battery life, using the relatively new Crusoe processor. And this was really the issue with the P2120.

The long battery life was at the cost of a significant amount of computing power. The battery may last twice as long as anything else, but it would actually take twice as long to do anything that really required some processing power. I don't mean to completely disparage the P2120 - it still is an amazing machine, but even for the "lightweight" development I was planning on doing, it wasn't enough power.

The second notebook was an iBook G3 that I got from eBay. It was a good price for a large monitor on a notebook. I bought it with the express purpose of testing web development in Safari. It seemed like I was always asking someone to look at something, or paying Browsercam for access. With all of the single-day passes I paid them for, I probably could have bought a much better G3. I probably should have, really.

Once again, a significant factor in deciding against the iBook was the power of the machine. It's a couple of generations behind, and with most things I do on it, you can watch them happen. I paid for a system with some upgrades - more RAM, more CPU - and I'm sure it made a difference, but not that much of a diference. Plus, it's a Mac, so I would have to get replacements for all of my Windows-based development tools. I'm not yet convinced that Mac development tools are everythin I would need, and I doubt that I could be convinced.

Should I even mention the old x486 I have sitting around? So it was time to buy a new notebook.

I decided straight away, as I did with my other notebook purchases, that this would not be a "skimp for price" system. I don't want to upgrade, and I don't want to buy a new system in a year because the one I just bought became suddenly outdated. After poking at some of the options, I decided to narrow down my options significantly by buying a tablet.

Why a tablet? Well, I can't really tell you. I've always thought that tablets were cool. I like the idea of drawing web design sketches directly on the screen. Plus, the tablet form factor means a couple of interesting things about the size and content of the notebook.

One thing that tablets require is that it be small. Gateway builds a pretty big machine in their "convertable" notebook, but that's about as big as it gets. Being a tablet also implies that the machine isn't going to be sitting in a clean desktop environment every time it is used.

Let's face it - people have been buying these monster "laptops" these days that are designed to supplant a desktop PC. I don't really see the point in that. If you want desktop power, you should also want desktop upgradeability. Powerful PCs are expensive; you should be able to exend the life of your investment with upgrades. This is so much harder to do with a notebook. And then you end up with a monolithic slab of heavyweight PC, monitor affixed and unmovable unless you spend another chunk of change and hook up a port replicator. It's just not what I'm into.

A tablet implies mobility. Not just that you want to move the PC from desk to desk, but from a desk to a car to a Starbucks to some open field somewhere. A bit of ruggedness is required.

I spent a lot of time ogling the Gateway Convertable. It's a pretty slick machine. I think there were a few other small details that had be decide against it, but the primary reason I didn't decide on it was because I went back to look at Fujitsu's latest offerings.

I didn't give a great impression of my P2120 above, but it really is a great little machine. It was perfect for what I wanted it for at the time, and I simply grew out of it, as I suppose I might have with any other notebook of that time. I feel bad that I didn't even consider Fujitsu until well into my search.

In any case, that's how I ended up at the Fujitsu T4215. The specs of my machine are pretty crazy of a notebook of its size. It sports an Intel Core 2 Duo 2Ghz processor, 2GB of RAM, and a modest 80GB hard drive. I opted for the high-resolution screen at 1600x1200 pixels, which is not supposed to work well outdoors, but I haven't really had a need to test it.

It has crazy connection options, with both 802.11a/b/g and Bluetooth wireless (which I can use with my Treo to get a connection virtually anywhere) along with the standard modem and ethernet jacks. A handful of USB ports are nice, but the really neat expansion port is the full-sized PC Card slot, which is hard to find in a notebook these days (since most opt for the PC Express card slot), but is the only size that wireless modems come in these days.

Of course, there is a removable dual-layer CD/DVD+/-R drive, but I ordered a bay battery with it, which is primarily how I have been using the machine. With the bay battery installed and charged, I get 5-6 hours of life while on the road.

And the tablet features themselves are pretty handy. It's nice to be able to take some written notes with drawings instead of having to describe everything completely in text. The handwriting recognition features are pretty slick and accurate. I haven't trained the dictation enough to get decent accuracy from it, but there's this whole noise-reducing microphone array built in.

The security on this thing is crazy, too. There is a built-in fingerprint scanner and smartcard reader. There's even a BIOS-based setting that allows you to lock the PC until you dial a certain combination of button presses using the quick-access keys on the monitor panel. There are a few other security features in there that I don't even understand.

And it has stupid little niceties, like a multi-card reader for the camera cards. The touchpad is pretty snazzy. There is a slot that holds the stylus so you don't have to wonder where it got to in the case. The latch that holds the cae closed or the screen down (it flips around backwards in tablet mode) is pretty crafty.

I'm very happy with my notebook choice. Everything in it seems to be working quite well, too. I've only been using it to write blog entries, do some design sketches, and playback movies so far, but I'm anxious to load some real software on here and get some development done out of the house. That should be very liberating.

I think the threshhold of my bathroom is a mind-wiping device.

At 5:53am, I woke up unexpectedly. No alarm, although there was one additional child in the bed at the time, and they tend to kick. I mused at the idea of how he might be affected when the alarm went off in seven minutes, and concluded that he'd simply sleep through it, like any good 2-year-old. It then occurred to me that the alarm wouldn't be going off in seven minutes, but in eight.

After a power outage on New Year's Eve, I had to reset the alarm, and I was lazy. When the time shot past 6am by a minute, I let it slide. In this small aberrance I found a world of speculation, and, I believed, fleetingly solved one of the deepest mysteries of my time - why the snooze is only 7 minutes long.

Odd that the snooze length is exactly how early I woke up before the actual alarm. But that's just coincidence.

So I spent the early morning springing from bed and darting over to the TV cabinet, atop which is perched our alarm. I'd poke the snooze button and head back to bed. Several miscellaneous thoughts passed through my mind while I repeated this process. Will Berta wake up after too many snoozes, erroneously thinking it's her day to get up first? How many times will I hit the snooze button today? Will Riley ever stir? Why does he take up more space in the bed each time I get up to push the snooze button?

One important thing about the mystery of the snooze button is to note that when you add that extra minute, two snoozes puts you squarely at quarter past the hour of the alarm. This isn't much different than 14 past the hour, but it seemed very significant in my hypnopompic state of marching across the 15 feet from my bed to the clock.

After the third hit, I had the answer to my question of "How many times?" and instead of returning to my warm spot under the covers, which was somehow now fully ensconced by toddler, I myself toddled off wearily to the bathroom, grinning with the full of knowledge of the brilliant secret of the seven minute snooze alarm.

And as I passed through the doorframe, flipped on the lights, rubbed the first bit of sleep from my eyes... gone.

This writing pad is specially lined so that you can draft your next million dollar screenplay with a pen or pencil while on the go, and not a word-processor.

It seems silly to long for the golden age of New Years parties, but I remember them fondly.

This year - quite currently - Berta has prepared meatball marinara with rolls and a nice corn dip for the Frito Scoops. There's some assorted fruit and Chex mix, too. All this food, it's a shame nobody came. Not that we invited anyone.

It's a weird situation. It's too difficult for me to figure out the intersection of the groups of people who would come, who I wouldn't mind having around, who can coexist with my kids, and who can stand to be near each other. I can think of a few people offhand who might qualify individually for the first three criteria, but then there's the insane puzzle of trying to figure out which friends get along with which other friends, and suddenly during all of this I come to the same two conclusions I usually end up at: I have to hang out with you all one-on-one, and I'm going to need some new friends. And so, no invites. Sorry everyone.

Anyway, this isn't a year-end retrospective on my friend selection. It's just sad that given a week or so to prepare some kind of simple gathering for New Years, I didn't call to invite anyone, and now there is a vat of tasty meatballs of which we've eaten maybe four. No, there's no cornbread, but hey, there's still an hour before next year.

Thinking back, I recall the year that my mom, on a kind of dare, arranged for us to go to Times Square on New Year's Eve. Berta and I stood out in the feezing cold for hours waiting for the ball to drop, and when they finally lit it up, it was practically a bright speck on top of a building several city blocks away. That was certainly a memorable year.

I'm trying to think of the more memorable but not overyly shocking New Years parties... Let's see... Oddly, Brian shows up in a few of these.

The first one is the year we spent the night in Pittsburgh. Berta and I went to someone's apartment that Brian had heard about (no, not a friend of his, just someone he'd heard about - he's... odd that way) and hung out. I guess we met another of his friends there, whose name I can't recall. There are several things that stand out in my memory of that occasion.

First, Brian's friend sung two songs. On one hand, I wouldn't poo-poo anyone's public effort of artistry. It takes chutzpah to perform in front of people. Especially songs that you wrote yourself. That are more like poems with some random-seeming pitch changes. And no instruments. Ok, yeah, that were really bad. Sorry. But, entertaining!

Also memorable was the guy at the door who was carding people to come in. Apparently - and this story is third-hand and years ago in memory - he was an ex-cop, and he had taken the job upon himself as the "authority figure" for the gathering. I don't think he knew the person who lived there either. I remember him being fussy about one of the three of us tapping the keg for some reason or other, and then Brian being verbally confrontational, which is funny because I really think Brian would have taken this guy. Ex-cop was already one or two sheets to the wind. (I have an idea where that expression comes from, and wonder if three sheets is really totally gone and whether it's ok to just be one or two sheets to the wind. Probably is.) Not that his sobriety level would have changed my mind about Brian's ability to take him.

Finally, about that particular party, I recall the playing on the stereo of Garth Brooks' "Friends In Low Places", which, being country, sent Brian into a rollicking good bit of guff, which we egged on by singing along with the rest of the crowd as someone cranked up the volume. My, that was entertaining.

On another New Year's Eve we went with Brian to the Dracula's Ball at the Trocadero in Philly. This would be the second time we would see Sunshine Blind. I'm not sure how I was convinced to do this twice, but I will admit to a weird stint of interest in the whole goth culture, not that I ever conformed to that stereotype. But that's a story for another time, as I'm sure you'll have interest in more detail.

Anyway, we hung around and listened to the bands play, and "danced" as it were. As goth people do. There was surprisingly less beer than one might expect because it was simply too difficult to acquire.

The upstairs was the only place that served alcohol, most at startling prices. Being that the concert hall was a remodeled burlesque parlor, you can imagine that the interior was not designed for quick exodus such as in the case of a fire, nor was the area reserved for drinking alcoholic beverages large enough to fit all of the people attempting to get limber. So what little time we spent there crammed against the other drinkers, we didn't do much drinking, which is really not a very goth thing anyway, now that I think back on it.

After the concert, people left pretty quickly. We headed back into West Chester, where everyone at Chris and Tracy's party had mostly passed out. Chris was a bit tipsy, and was teasing some girl he had just met who was very tipsy. I think she passed out in the middle of us asking her some of those questions that you ask drunk people to get them amusingly confused. Bummer.

Well, in stark contrast to all that, the kids are all done their bubble bath, and I think we're going to watch the animated Charlotte's Web or something before the ball drops.

I hope you all had a great 2006. Perhaps tomorrow I'll recap the year, as is traditional. Lots of changes for me this year to keep track of. Looking forward seems like a good idea, too. Ok, there's a lighted ball calling my name.