I thought for sure that she’d say something about her birthday. I guess she’s just been too busy to post anything about it.

Part of Nad’s birthday was spent at work, which was not her plan. Some crap happened at work that forced her to go in. I got her a few things, including two books that she already owned. In fact, I had just bought one of those books for her the day before. We also had dinner that evening.

Her birthday was officially celebrated at home in NY. She shared the day with two of her siblings; the three of them have birthdays with 60 days of each other. We have a couple of pics to be posted later. Many many family members poured into the house. It was like Thanksgiving dinner all over again.

I call it her “final” birthday because next year will be Nad’s first Unbirthday. She’s going to count backward for a decade or two until she decides to reverse the count again, at which time her Unbirthdays will be named Rebirthdays (or whatever name she picks for them).

I gave Will a PX flyer to look at a camera. The child in the LCD screen had a uni-brow and Will commented on how ‘less than cute’ he was. He thought that the photographer should have ‘corrected’ the photo prior to allowing it to be seen by millions of Servicemen and women.

Fact is regardless of how ‘less than cute’ a baby may be, you never say it out loud - especially if you have not had children yet. So now not only will our future little girl have a unibrow, she will also have a mustache…

Thank you Will…and baby girl A. M. Diaz thanks you, too.

Sunday morning I woke up to a very distraught Nadia standing in the doorway to our bedroom. I asked her what was the matter, and her only response was, “I need a new computer now.”

TELETRAN1 is the name of my five-year-old Dell Dimension 550lr. It is a Pentium 3 550Mhz PC with 512MB RAM… running Windows XP Pro. Just in case you didn’t know, that PC was way underpowered to run that OS. To make matters worse, I thought it was a great idea to partition the 20GB hard drive into three separate drives, two 5GB drives and one 10GB. I put the OS on one of the 5GB partitions.

If you don’t understand what any of that meant, then just understand that I setup a very weak machine poorly, which didn’t help it run any better. If you did understand, then please don’t laugh at me too much. Besides, the PC was falling apart. For example, the CD-ROM sounded like it was getting ready to take off whenever it was used. Poor Nadia has been stuck using this PC as her main machine for the better part of three years.

After discussing what kind of PC Nad needed and what payment arrangement we could work out, we went out the door to the Post Exchange to find TELETRAN1’s replacement.

After a great deal of deliberation, she decided on an hp Pavilion Media Center PC, which is a beast of a machine. It is a Pentium D 920 (2.8Ghz) 2GB RAM, which is far superior to TELETRAN2 (P4 2.0Ghz 1GB RAM) and MOONBASE1 (P3 1.0Ghz 256MB RAM). No PC gamer will be impressed with the new PC’s stats, but for Nadia’s needs, it will do an excellent job for a long time.

At a later time, I will discuss how the Media Center PC has enhanced the Xbox 360. I’m sure that Nad will discuss a bit about how much more she likes this new PC, which is supposed to be named TELETRAN3; due to her sentimental attachment to the name TELETRAN1 (the name of the supercomputer used by the Autobots in the Transformers cartoon series), it is now also named TELETRAN1.

Eventually, the original TELETRAN1 will be flattened and brought back as a Linux box.