18 March 2026
==============

February was not a good month and some part of March joined February
in its misery. Just to not whine too much and just recapitulate
about the unhappy things:

We went from a stomach bug to a cold and back, got a mice invasion
in the house (while having a cat...), followed by ants. Got some
accounts hacked (i still don't know /HOW/, lost some money and to
top it all off a power surge during the first thunderstorm this
year killed a whole ton of electronics in the house... including
all of my connected computers. The joy...

The more expensive items (stove, television and so on) are covered
by insurance but i not even tried to file the loss of my computers,
i am pretty sure the sum the insurance would pay out would cover
at most a beer (a can... of the cheaper kind). So here i were...
again without a computer, again lost the systems i had in the same
way i already lost one very expensive computer over a decade ago.
*Sigh*

I contemplated what to do, buy just a new laptop and be good? Nah...
not the way i like to do things. I knew that in the company we
still had some old laptops in storage, still shrink wrapped in
their original packaging and put in storage as replacement units.
As the company never throws those things away (and very, very seldom
sells them) i asked my boss for permission, grabbed one and became
the proud owner of a new, 20 year old laptop. The specifications
are not that bad: A AMD Sempron processor, 512 MB RAM (i immediately
upgraded to 2 GB) and a spinning hard drive (which i replaced with
an SSD). After installing antiX (i could have gone a different
road... but sometimes you need simply something that works), setting
up things like Claws-Mail, compiling Dillo and generally getting
comfortable i am pretty impressed: The system feels oddly fast -
weirdly, sometimes better than my deceased old Thinkpad - and even
modern Firefox does... work... even in a not really fun way. But
not being able to get lost in the modern web is a plus in my weird
mind. Its somehow weird that the laptop feels... new. Everything
is clicky and snappy as it should be, the screen is surprisingly
bright and only the battery is showing its age and only got about
20 minutes of life left in it - but i am pretty sure i will find
a replacement for it.

The fallout of the idiotic war the US started with Iran now is -
even besides rapidly increasing costs of living - even showing up
in our small backwaters town: There were violent clashes between
people wishing for the Sha's son to take power and people who are
in favor of the current theocracy, luckily, thanks to the fast
response of the local police, nobody was injured too badly.
Interestingly, now, about a week later, both sides seem to be
somewhat united again in their resentment against the US...