I spent the last few days running around to meetings, putting the finishing touches on Mad Art (a book coming your way shortly from Watson-Guptill), lunching with Stan Lee (he says hi back), prepping my speech for tomorrow's luncheon in honor of June Foray and, most of all, setting up my new computer. It's a Pentium-4 with 512 Meg RDRAM, two 120 gig harddisks, a DVD-Rom drive, a 40X CD-RW, a 250 mb Zip drive, an automatic ice maker, a built-in toaster oven, a set of wind chimes, five golden rings, four calling birds…
Okay, I'm lying about those last few. But it's a helluva computer and I would like to again plug/recommend Bill Goldstein to anyone in the L.A. area who's in the market for anything that computes. I couldn't have asked for wiser or better service. You can visit his website at www.wdgoldstein.com. Even if you don't buy anything there, he has a good repository of virus removal tools, as well as a terrific on-line video of a segment he did for the local news. It's about how people donate old computers to charity or sell them, thinking wrongly they've purged the hard drive of personal info. Bill and a reporter went to a thrift store, picked out some donated computers and Bill was able to restore the donor's files…including credit card numbers, personal data and probably a lot of downloaded porn. A good, cautionary tale.
Things will be back to normal here as soon as things are back to normal here, if you know what I mean. Our web counter will be topping a quarter of a million hits any day now and we'll celebrate by putting up a few new (old) columns. Or something.