I work for an online computer reseller, writing up product descriptions for stuff like processors, motherboards, systems, and so forth. I've got bookmarks to just about every computer hardware site I can find, and I check them all pretty frequently to see what's new. Motherboards is one of my "pet" categories, which I like to think I've helped to grow during my tenure here, and I get a little competitive about the range of products we have available as compared to the offerings of other online stores.

So from time to time, while browsing through our databases, I'll come upon some new board, and my co-workers will hear me wax poetic over a gobbledegook string of characters and acronyms:

"Yes! Finally! We got revision 1.2 of FIC's VA-503+! And SED has it in EDI for $67! Beat that, CDW! Ha!"

Within the first couple of months of taking this job, I was having dreams about installing extra memory in my friends' PC's and making various other tweaks to coax out some extra speed, earning the admiration of all.

Before one trip to visit my wife's parents, I printed out several pages from the PC Guide (www.pcguide.com, an excellent site) which explained hard drive partitioning, recommended BIOS settings and a bunch of other stuff, as my weekend reading. Jacqueline had to exercise some wifely leverage to get me away from the tech stuff and back into the family conversation.

There's more, but I can't think of it just now. This thread reminds me of the first couple of paragraphs of _Dave Barry in Cyberspace_, where Dave explains what a pathetic computer geek he's gotten to be. As an example, he mentions his typical response to the "lurid centerfold" pictures in the computer shopper magazines he subscribes to, which was something like, "Whoa! Check out the 12X SCSI-2 CD-ROM drive on THAT baby!"

Iss "233MHz PII at 112MHz FSB x 2.5 is the way to go" achar