I got my Lenovo laptop back today. It was very strange. I sent it off to them several days ago and never received a phone call or email or anything of that nature. Then suddenly today it shows up on my doorstep. They replaced the motherboard. I really hope that fixed the issue. I won't know until I work on it for a few hours if it's fixed. Part of me hopes for it to lock up and break again so that I can return it and get an ultra-portable laptop. But the other part of me wants it to stay fixed so that I can have an ultra-powerful laptop.

I was working at Beaners again today and I looked out the window to see some guy taking a picture of the back of my truck with his cell phone. I still have the PHP and MySQL logos on the back. So I ran outside to meet him with a, "Hey, are you a nerd too?" He was. He looked like one too. It was great. Nerds are cool. And nerds that can dance are even cooler. I thought I'd just throw that one out there. Speaking of which, some of the WCS ladies left some nice comments for me. ;) Thank you ladies. The pleasure was all mine.

Today we moved from one temporary living situation to another. The old place was a house that was up for sale and we were allowed to stay there until it sold. It sold within one week of us moving into it. But we were able to stay there for almost a month. That month has come and gone and now we are living in a fully furnished apartment. We'll be living here for exactly one month and then we move once more into Craig Gross' house for the month of August.

The apartments here are quite nice. There is free breakfast 5 times a week (not biscuits and gravy or anything, but breakfast nonetheless). There is a free work-out room. Free indoor pool and jacuzzi. And a few perks such as a free membership to a local gym. I'm going to find out more details about that on Monday. There is also internet access, but it's kind of slow. Probably because it's shared throughout the building and there's a guy across the way named William downloading entire seasons of The Simpson's. Over all it's a pretty nice living situation.

Moving around like this has made me think about why I brought so much junk and what it's going to be like when I travel around the world with William. We'll be moving place to place non-stop for a full year. Wow. This little 3-time move in Grand Rapids is making me realize how important it is to travel light.

One of the things I brought up here was my professional camera, the Canon XL2 that we haven't even used for anything yet. It made me start to think about how it's going to just sit there in storage for the whole time I'm traveling the world. So I think I'm going to sell it. Along with the accessories: case, tripod, Kata backpack... I don't know. It's my baby! If I did sell it, I'd give piority to a few friends who might want it like Braedon or Andrew. But I would be sad to see her go.

No word from Lenovo about my computer headache.

The return box for my broken laptop came in from Lenovo this morning. Wow - it was here less than 24 hours from when I called Lenovo. That's some fast shipping on DHL's part. I packaged the laptop in it and dropped it off at a DHL shipper. So now I'm just waiting on a Lenovo technician's phone call or email.

Let's make some predictions about what they're going to say:

"Mr. Powers, we received your laptop and have run some hardware diagnostics on it. We weren't able to find any problems with the hardware. So we restored the operating system to factory defaults and it is working fine."

Well that's great, but I ran diagnostics too and all the tests passed. I also reformatted the hard drive and it still froze up after that.

"After we reformatted it, it seems to be working fine."

Well, after I reformatted it, it continued to freeze.

"It is working fine now, perhaps it was a program you had installed that made it freeze."

No. It froze up as soon as I took it out of the box originally - before I loaded any software onto it.

"That may have been a different issue with the computer than this one."

I find it very hard to believe that a brand-new computer that has never worked properly from the get-go is assumed to be dysfunctional because of something I have done to it with normal use.

"Well sir, the issue seems to be resolved as it is working fine now."

How do you know that it's "working fine now"? Did you work on it for a few hours until it locked up on you?

"No, but we did a full-"

Then clearly you don't know for sure that it's working.

"We believe that it is an issue with one or more of the programs that you had installed. It is running fine after we reset it to factory defaults."

So your telling me that I can't run my programs on my new computer without them crashing it? What's the point of even having the laptop? To sit there and stare a Windows Vista all day?

"No sir, you need to install one program at a time until it locks up again in order to eliminate them from the suspected troublesome programs."

That's not acceptable. I guarantee if you work on it for a few hours even with NOTHING on it but Windows, IT WILL LOCK UP. I guarantee it. I'll put money on it.

After a little bit more back-and-forth, I'll have them send it back to me and then I'll try to get it returned. I'll make sure to post the real conversation once they contact me.