Some women go crazy over shoes and fantasize about owning a  pair of Jimmy Choo strappy sandals. I am not one of those women.  I hate shoes and would rather go barefoot almost 100% of the time.

What does get my materialistic motor revving, though, is things computer related. I commented to Colleen that most people don't expect someone like me to be the type of person who buys a computer and immediately has it modded to become a sweet gaming machine. Very seriously, she looked and me and said "You're the new face of geek." Which cracked me up because it's true.

After giving it some deep thought, I realized a while back that I tend to think of my PC in the same loving way I did my dog. Like my dog, it offers a lot of loyalty, and is useful. And I cringe to see its case cracked open to be modified, the same way I'm hated bringing Princess to the vet.

So if my PC is my dog, then my pocket PC is surely my puppy.

This week I had to operate on my puppy! After ten months of constant use, the battery had had it. It would only hold a charge for a half hour or so, which is no good if you need to write on the go. And I need to write on the go. I'd probably become catatonic if away from some sort of computer/word processing program for longer than a week. Therefore, I had to bite the bullet and replace the battery.

A task, I have to say, not made easy by the manufacturer. Finding the right battery wasn't too difficult, although it took nearly two weeks to arrive from Hong Kong. (incidentally, the second thing I've ordered from there in the past month. go ebay) What was hard was opening the case. I thought the screws were hexes, but they weren't. They're star-shaped, tork screws.  Being the average chick, I didn't own any tork drivers; hell, I'm probably ahead of the game having access to hex keys. So I needed to buy some.

Worse, there was no way to tell what size I needed. Unfortunately, my first excursion for drivers ended up a bust. T6 was the smallest bit in the set I found, and it was barely too big. So I knew then I needed to find a T5 or maybe even T4 bit. Which took me 4 stores of searching through to find. Not even radio shack sold them that small.

Long story short, I found them at the aforementioned terrible, terrible Home Depot, and got the job done with only a little bit of trepidation when it didn't power up immediately. It did once I hooked it to the charger.  The only other bad surprise is that my address book was lost because unhooking the old battery wiped the memory, and it apparently isn't one of the things backed up in my documents. Oh well, I had a hard copy of my important addresses anyway, so I put them back in by hand.

I hope this battery lasts a long time, since I'd rather not do any more home surgery.

Side question: is a girl talking about things like tools or military planes a turn on, or just something the x-files writers made up?