Picked up an LCD monitor at Fry's today. I asked the salesperson what their cheapest monitor was, and he pointed out the row of 17" monitors, so I asked if they had anything cheaper, it didn't matter how small it was, a 14 or 15" would be fine. He said all they carried anymore was 17", but then he mentioned there was a 15" in the back that he'd been hoping to get rid of. He checked with his boss, and they dropped the price down to $120, a pretty darn good price for a brand new Compaq 15" LCD screen. It's a pretty nice one too, though from the price tag, it had been on the shelves for a loooooong time. It was originally marked at $429.95. Apparently I got it well below their cost.

Now, why would anybody want to buy a 15" monitor? Because I've hooked it up to my ancient Sony Vaio desktop, a Celeron 266 with Windows 98 (first edition). I pumped up the RAM and installed a network card, and it's not a bad little machine. But it hadn't been used since 1998, so it had a TON of Windows Updates to install. But Windows Update didn't like IE 4.0, so I had to find the IE 6.0 upgrade first. I transfered the weather station software over to it, then spent an hour tearing my hair out because I couldn't establish a connection to the server. I finally discovered the problem: I'd configured the server to only accept NTLMv2 authentication, which Windows 98 can't handle. D'OH! Everything appears to be up and running properly. I'm hoping this machine will remain stable for a while.

While I was out, I got my car washed and waxed. Normally I do that myself in the garage, but my garage is kinda full right now, and it's too hot and sunny to try to wax outdoors.

I also stopped into Albertsons and found they have 30 medium eggs for 99 cents! I don't know if that's a local thing or chain wide, but that's a pretty darn good price!