My sister gave me an organizer a couple of weeks ago, to replace the one I bought and almost immediately lost back at the start of the fall semester. She'd been given it by somebody else, but had no use for it herself.

I find it interesting to note that while it starts with yearly calendars for 1999 through 2001, the monthly and weekly pages all have spaces left for the date with the "19" already printed by the year. In other words, I now have an organizer that's not Y2K compliant.

The pages are really ugly, anyway. I'm tempted to spring for a refill set from Day-Timer, which is the company that made the organizer I'd previously had and lost. Their layout was perfect.

Alternately, I could just ignore the aesthetics and use the thing as-is.

Come to think of it, I'm not sure you wanted to know that.

It started with that hard drive I got on Columbus Day. I then got a Pentium 233 CPU on eBay, right about the time that the end-of-semester crunch came. After some initial trouble with the thing, I decided that I couldn't afford the headache just then, and went back to my Pentium 75. I figure I'll try again once I get a CPU fan, which I'm hoping will solve the problem.

And now I've upgraded my CD-ROM drive, again through eBay. This one's a 48x Mitsumi IDE drive. The old one was a 4x Teac drive, which used the old, proprietary Sound Blaster interface.

This has been in the making for awhile, partly because my third attempt at getting Linux to work on my system fell through because I couldn't get the driver for the old drive to work... and all of the files were on CD-ROM. Plus, installing Word 2000 took forever on the old drive. So I'd already decided that an upgrade would be nice. Preferably a CD-R drive, so I could make my own mix CDs, although for that to be useful, I'd need to get a new Discman, too.

However, the catalyst was that I borrowed Curse of Monkey Island from a friend. He's had it for awhile, but it requires Windoze 95, so I couldn't even try to play it until recently. But now that I'm using Win98 (a statement that still amazes me) and finals are over, I borrowed it. But the old drive was too slow for it to work. And I've been waiting to play this game, the third in the Monkey Island trilogy, ever since finishing the second installment years ago.

So I got the new drive on Thursday evening, spent about an hour fussing with cables and jumpers and parts and stuff until I got everything to work properly, and proceeded to stay up all night playing the thing. And writing two Soapbox entries in rapid succession towards morning.

I'm up to Part IV just now. So far, it seems to be easier than the second game in the series (and I'm playing in the harder, "Mega-Monkey" mode), but it's lots of fun, and the use of multimedia is incredible. The graphics and sound blow the earlier installments out of the water.

As far as future upgrades go, I figure that a memory expansion from my current 32MB is next in line, but that'll probably wait. There's no pressing need for it just now.