I'm an impulsive person at times. Wednesday started out with an ICQ from Michael Rudy. His hard drive had died and a repair person blamed a virus, so he was asking me for a new computer since I bought this one a couple of years ago. Now, there's a fleeting thought that maybe he's trying to take advantage of me, but I quickly squish that thought. If you start thinking that people are not good and honest then life becomes much too dark. Really, his family has a hard enough time with his medical care and an Internet computer is vital for him because he can rarely go out.

But I did find it hard to believe that a virus could kill your hard drive, not that I've ever had a virus myself to compare with. Still, he did say that he reformatted the drive and now it didn't mount. Well, a new drive is obviously the answer. Then he mentioned that the CD-ROM had more or less stopped working and that the monitor was getting flaky (it's an iMac). Well, maybe the computer is just getting old. I can see it breaking down if he has a hot room.

So I end up ordering a refurbished iMac 600/256/40 -- the midrange, not the top of the line. Actually, right now there is a $150 rebate from Apple plus the mail order companies are offering extra RAM and MacWarehouse had an extra printer too. Still, the refurbished is the same as the rebate with the advantage that I don't have to worry about sending in a rebate. The extra RAM is nice but not really necessary and Michael already has a printer.

As a bonus, I'm going to have him ship his old computer to me so I can fix it. I can buy a FireWire hard drive and a CD-ROM player and as long as the internal monitor lasts for a few minutes I can set it up to use an external monitor. Then I can build up a system for my Mom to use, which will be much faster than the Performa 6400 that she uses now. I did just give her our Epson 850Ne printer which has a Mac serial port, but I borrowed Dave's Belkin serial to USB adapter so that should take care of that.

So then I can take the Performa 6400 and set it up as my emergency Internet server. The old PowerMac 6100 is non-functional right now since the hard drive died and without a CD-ROM I can't install System Software (and I can't do it from my PowerBook because it won't run software that old). The I can finally get rid of that PowerMac which I've had since 1993 or maybe 1994.

But I still haven't gotten to the impulsive part. I was feeling so good about this great thing I had done for a friend, because I love giving gifts, that when I was driving to work on Thursday I decided that this is the year that I'm giving everybody gifts. That includes my family (of course), my gaming friends, and many of my coworkers (well, anybody who I interact with day to day). Eventually the list came to thirty people (but I ended up adding two more people when I was shopping) and even at $20 a gift that's a lot of money. In fact, with the gifts and Michael's computer, that's more than my monetary reserve.

But what the heck I thought. I'll worry about that later. I'll be making people happy and doing my part to help the economy. Still, the one doubt was how to make it anonymous. The problem is that I don't want people to feel obligated to give me a gift and I don't want to say that on the card, but if they don't know who it's from then everything is ok and I don't have to worry too much about giving inappropriate gifts.

So my plan was to come in Sunday night and distribute the gifts. To cap it off I even had a gift for myself so people wouldn't trace it that way. The only flaw I saw was Pick, since either he would get a gift on Saturday during gaming and therefore no gift on Monday, or he'd get no gift on Saturday while everyone else got one and then he'd get a gift on Monday. I didn't want to bring him into my plan so I just decided to give him his gift on Saturday. More brilliantly, that would mean that he wouldn't get a gift Monday and all suspicion would fall on him. Muhahaha!

Too bad it didn't quite work out as planned...