Or as I said to M. this morning, “I sure hope so.”

Not only did M. provide a Chinese New Year’s greeting (OK, more of an acknowledgement), but I also got a card from the Charles Wang Community Health Center, where I once gave some cash in memorial of someone’s mom. M. tells me the Chinese like the cash gifts.

(That last sentence sounded more racist than funny (as it was meant). Maybe it’s funny to me, because the memorial donation was actually the result of some liberal hand-wringing around my former place of employ. Various educated types went around researching and polling what to do when a Chinese immigrants’s mother has died. Giving cash was tough on their sensitive Brookline-y, Newton-ish souls. (And, of course, the hand-wringers don’t actually believe in souls.)

The more important news is I have my poor, unfortunate back from the dead Powerbook. Much rejoicing should be heard throughout the land.

Thank GOOOODDDDDDD. If the withdrawals from using a Windoze laptop were not painful enough, my particularly obnoxious brother was screaming at me that “open source” was stupid and Linux is a piece of crap during the Superbowl. Maybe it was the testosterone, adrenalin cocktail of major league football. Or maybe that his bread and butter is becoming more obviously subpar (or at least more obvious to those folks who never knew before that they had choices).

Here’s an article from someone better stating what I think is obvious (and thus rendering the Superbowl scream match irrelevant). Seems like a good sign that the article is from the location to which I am heading.

Actually, it wasn’t so much the slagging off on Linux I minded. It was the completely uninformed, fucktarded assertion that openoffice.org is “a piece of shit program that can’t do even a fraction of what Word can do.”

Dude, I’ve been hard-core, power-using wordprocessoring since before you discovered you could program. Sure it was suck-ass, tortured, pre-adolescent bullshit writing, but I was type, type, typing into little bits and bytes long, long ago.

Openoffice.org can do MORE than Word (including save to Word and other programs well (not some shitty modified RTF with garbage characters, like Word), including one of its best features, saving to PDF), and it isn’t half as aggravatingly non-intuitive. Word has always been and will always be one of the most cantankerous, frustrating, fucked up wordprocessors. Asserting it’s superiority is just pure retardation (no offense to anyone differently abled who would likely never make such a foolish claim).

Sorry, just venting here on my newly recovered Powerbook. By the way, it’s the Steve Austin of computers now. Better, stronger, etc. Well, at least when the hard drive crash I had it replaced with one twice as big. Yeah, 80 gigs just waiting to be loaded with my crap.

Speaking of the “Six Million Dollar Man,” my heart is a tad crushed today. After a couple of years (almost) of relatively smooth sailing with M. I have found a place of serious discordance and incompatibility — Television of the 70s and 80s.

In 24 hours, shows like “Miami Vice” and “Battlestar Galactica” have cropped up in conversation. Do I admit my true feelings and mock his taste? Or do I use this moment in our relationship to learn more about him and perhaps forge new ties?

I’m thinking mocking. I mean, really, “Miami Vice” has always been and will always be just totally freaking gay.