My holiday season was dimmed a bit last week when my HP Pavillion DV9235NR decided to die on me. It turns out the GPU on those laptops is not very reliable, in fact there is a major thread on HP's site about this issue . Since it became obvious I was going to have to spend upwards of $400 to fix the issue and with the price of a Toshiba replacement only $599 I decided to just replace the laptop.

It's definately been a great decision for a lot of reasons. First the Toshiba laptop is an incredible value considering my HP cost nearly twice as much. Sure the HP had some cool features, like the digital TV tuner but I only used that once. Also the HP laptop had a 17 inch screen which was novel two years ago but has become very passe as they consume so much energy it defeats the purpose of having a laptop. I found myself chained to my power cord, what freedom is that? This new laptop has a 15" screen and a battery life of 4 hours. That sure beats the pants off the 40 minutes my old laptop gave me.

The Toshiba gives me everything I need, a 2ghz duo core processor, 3 GB of ram and 250GB of hard drive space. The unit also packs a DVD+RW drive, wireless network adapter, built-in webcam and microphone, media adapter for my photo cards and an iLink interface for downloading video. Oh I forgot to mention the Harman/Kardon speakers, makes my old laptop sound downright tinny! This laptop does not having anything I don't need, I'm very impressed. Now we just wait and see how long this one lasts and as usual I will continue to backup important data because if one thing is for certain about computer equipment is that it's not will it fail but when....

Currently Bestbuy is sold out of this unit online but if you check their stores you may be able to find it. I found mine at the Northgate store in Seattle. 

If you haven't been to epicurious.com before you should really check it out. I'm not sure why anyone would ever by a cookbook again, unless you like the fancy pictures and binding. What you don't get with a book is a recipe that has been reviewed by other so you get an idea of whether it's a waste of time and ingredients or not.

I was crazing chicken piccata so I went to epicurious.com and found a very simple and tasty recipe. I would definately reccomend it but I would agree with some reviewers that you should double the liquids except for the lemon. Also I would reduce the capers and parsley by half and use thin cut chicken breasts.

So much for that 700 Billion dollar shot in the arm. I realize it will take awhile to take "Affect" but it looks like this is going to get worse, much worse before it gets better.

I guess the only thing to do is to just ride this out and not get too panicked. I don't have any stocks or a 401K but I know that these markets affect everything else in our economy so when they crash so does the job market and jobs.

Lets hope that was the bottom....

Have we hit the bottom? I don't have any stocks in the market fortunately but I do know people who have lost so much in so little time. This chart represents a decline of roughly 8,300,000,000,000 - That's over 8 TRILLION dollars my friends.

Here are the kids from this weekend.