New keyboard!

This post is brought to you by my "brand new" (to me) keyboard! Several weeks ago, the original keyboard to my Gateway desktop (circa 2002) started to crap out on me, one key at a time. First I couldn't use the 5 or 6 key. Hey, that's okay -- that's what the number pad is for! Then the left Shift key went out. Hey, that's why they have 2 of those! And then the colon/semicolon, apostrophe/quotation marks, and dash/underscore all went out. Uh oh. Especially since there's an underscore in my email address, which is the login for most of the stuff I do online. So for the last few weeks, if you've seen me type any of those punctuation marks, I was either on Chris' laptop, or I was actually cutting and pasting the text from other web pages. This got tiresome, let me tell you.

But no more! Now I have a refurbished keyboard from Free Geek, a local computer recycling non-profit. They took my old one -- I'm sure they'll be able to fix it up for somebody else -- and sold me a "new" one for $4! Suck on that, Radio Shack! And since there was a $5 minimum on debit cards, I also got a lovely CD of Cajun music for $1 (leftovers from the local community radio station). This $5 minimum thing has been thwarting me a lot lately. Guess I should start carrying a little bit of cash more often.

The only downside? It wasn't until after I got it home that I realized it was missing one of the props on the back that tips it forward. Oh well. It was $4! I can type on it flat or rig a prop myself.