Brilliant student is brilliant.

I have a student who has a shot at the merit scholarship, though I'm not quite sure he made it. (Darn, those PSAT scores take a long time.)

Anyway, this student (who shall henceforth be known as Mr. Wit), out of blue mentions:

"Have you ever noticed that all the side effects of cold medicines are cold symptoms?" He added, "And the side effects of antidepressants are symptoms of depression."

He gave me a dry, wry smile.

Computer: what should I buy? :D

Hellooooooo, techies! I'll trade you a drabble for advice.

It is time.

The laptop I have on indefinite loan from gblvr (hi! *waves*) is now sadly out of date. I can't upgrade from Firefox 2.0.

Slowly over the last few months Gmail, YouTube, Pandora, Twitter, Facebook, have all either stopped working or informed me they're running stripped down versions so "please upgrade your browser!"

AO3 informed me the reason I can't reply to comments is that I'm running Firefox 2.0 so "please upgrade your browser!"

Evernote doesn't work, Flash doesn't work.... This month, Pandora stopped working entirely.

That's it. I'm not going through the holidays without my music.

I'm poking at www.newegg.com to see what I can get to rope my ex into build my own system.

My requirements:

- Ridiculous amounts of hard drive space for downloaded eps and gazillions of copies of novel-length fics (draft 1, draft 23...) and all that music
- The standard USB and HDMI ports
- CD burner
- Decent (but not gamer level) video card
- As upgradeable as possible (which usually means the fastest possible chip) since, as you can tell, I hang on to computers for a while.
- I never take the laptop anywhere, so a desk system is fine.

Two questions.

Firstly: What video card should I get? The ex is used to gamer video cards and has no idea what to get for someone who doesn't need to run, say, WoW.

Secondly: What chip should I get? The ex says that the rate of change is so steep these days, it makes no difference, it's out of date in two years. True. But people who keep up with technology don't understand -- you really can push it. And I do. gblvr's laptop was new in 1999.

And here's your drabble:

( Aliens For Thanksgiving )