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Greetings and welcome to today's random thought.

For my birthday gift to me I ordered a new computer. Well this is not entirely true, the wife and I have discussed getting a new one for a while now and were just waiting on the next smokin' Dell deal. Since my birthday is next week, we are kind of counting this as my birthday present. I got a nice 3 Ghz computer with 1 GB RAM and a 19" Flat Panel monitor for < $500. This blog is just about the first thing I have done on the new computer (and isn't that how it should be?).

The computer came with Windows XP Home Edition. I say that by faith as before the Dell splash screen was even gone from the initial boot up, I was pointing it toward the Ubuntu Live CD in the CD player. I have fell in love with Ubuntu from the minute I installed it. A note about the installation. I have installed variations of Windows (from 3.1 to XP) probably over 100 times and seldom does it take less than 45 minutes. With God as my witness the Ubuntu install took 10 minutes. I still don't believe it and I was the one who installed it!
And everything works! The first time! And it is FREE!

Since I was going to have to mess with computer wires anyway, I decided to attempt to mount a few things out of the way while I was at it. Things like the DSL Modem, the Vonage Router and the APC Surge Protector. This required some screws. Now those of you who know me know that I am not a handy man (by any stretch of the imagination).

The family and I went to Lowe's to try to find the screws I would need. Now I have this fear that secretly just inside the Lowe's entrance doors are testosterone sensors. And if you are not enough of a man, they don't let you in. I do all kinds of things to get into Lowe's. Usually riding with another man in HIS pick up truck gives you enough residual testosterone to get in. You can also "piggy back" your way in by walking real close to another man as he is walking in (you must be real careful though as walking too close could cause other obvious problems). Somehow with this Lowe's I got past the sensors.

Anyway, back to looking for screws. Holy Cow there are lots of kinds of screws! It appeared as though there were 2 basic measurements you needed to figure out: the size of the head of the screw and the length of the screw. Well the length was the easy part as I needed only 1/2" or maybe 3/4" (I settled on 3/4"). The head size (4, 6, 8, 10, etc) was a different matter. Each device I wanted to mount appeared to need a different head size. So I do what I always to at Lowe's, I guessed (wrong). That is not entirely true, of the 2 bags of screws that I bought (size 8 and size 10), one of them actually fit one device.

This is better than I usually do. I guess I will go back to Lowe's tomorrow and try to get past the sensors again.

Thanks for reading my Random Thoughts.

Jon