Fun at Fry's

Got Skzx's new computer for school last night. He moves hundreds of miles away in a few weeks and needs time to verify Facebook works correctly on it.

Went to Fry's. Once upon a time that was the place for the geeks of Silicon Valley to get all their electronic components and gizmos to invent new stuff with. Now it's just a big-ass electronics dealer with branches all over. But it's real electronics. Besides TVs and washing machines they still sell a lot of parts and tools. I like browsing.

We narrowed the field and got him something with, as they used to say about Rolls-Royce engines, "sufficient" power. One more thing to check off the list.

I hate shopping. But I love shopping with ma boys. Invariably. Doing just about anything, really.

It was also fun to look at one of the netbooks and say to the sales guy, oh yeah, I've got the innards for that one all over my desk. Powered up, guts out, trying to solve a problem the manufacturer has found. He sort of gave that little smirk that people do for an instant when they think something's cool and don't want to show it. That was fun.