I'm going to resume using Radio Userland to continue my weblog experiments. I lost quite a few postings on the way back from Beijing when my Toshiba Satellite Pro died again. It seems to be work now, after the main board was replaced. My theory is that the underlying problem was a failure of the temperature regulation system, which caused various parts to fail. Certainly Toshiba can't have made a profit on this computer, but I don't think I'll trust it for another trip.

I was able to replace it with a truly wonderful computer, an IBM Thinkpad T40 model. (http://www6.tomshardware.com/mobile/20030418/).

 It's much lighter than the Toshiba, faster, cooler (in both senses), and has wonderful wireless sensitivity. The only ways in which it's worse are that it lacks Toshiba's analog volume control dial on the side of the computer, and the screen resolution is slightly worse (1400 x 1050 for the IBM vs. p to 1600 x 1200 for the Toshiba).

At school, I use a cheap 2-port KVM switch from IOGear (http://www.iogear.com/products/product.php?Item=GCS62) to switch one of my external monitors between the desktop computer and laptop machine, so I can have a two-screen setup on whichever computer I'm using.

The Thinkpad also has a number of very nice IBM touches for switching screen displays and setting up other options quickly, and all in all it's been a wonderful machine in the month or so that I've had it.