Welcome to the new and improved particleman.org. Yes, it looks basically the same. Yes, all the old stuff is still here. But what you don’t see is what makes all that work worth the brief hiatus. Many thanks to John for helping me with the importation process. He found a way to import my old tables into the standard Moveable Type tables while retaining all the fields, the time stamps, the categories, and of course the comments. For those of you who don’t know what that means, just keep reading.

I’ve been busy the past few weeks. Busy doing – you guessed it – not much of anything. I did have a fun father-and-son day last Saturday. My dad managed to fix my laptop and then we went to the car show. Did I tell you about the broken laptop? Oh, it’s an awesome story.

I get home one night and turn on my laptop. Nothing happens. No false start, no blue screen, no nothing. I take out the power cord and notice it looks different. It seems part of the inside of the power jack broke off in the computer. I plug it in again and notice little sparks fly out of the jack. Interesting. I press the power button. Still nothing. I unplug the jack and plug it in again. More sparks. I call the manufacturer and they want $550 to fix it. I say Thanks But No Thanks. I take it the store where I bought it and they say the laptop is worth less than it would cost to fix it because the motherboard is toast. Turns out the power receptacle broke, and the power receptacle is attached to the motherboard, and they’re not about to go hunting around Houston for that power receptacle. I say Thanks Anyway (jackass).

I take the laptop to my dad. He decides to do exactly what the store would not do – he hunts around Houston for the power receptacle. He goes to his favorite parts outlet and, lo and behold, finds the power receptacle. For two dollars. He spends three hours carefully dismantling the laptop, soldering the new power receptacle on to the motherboard, and putting it all back together. He presses the button. It works. I love my dad. God bless dads who are engineers.

After that, we went to the car show and ogled all the cool new cars. Did you know that Hondas, some of the most efficient cars out there, produce more smog than many other cars out there? More than Volvos, which are probably less efficient on the average. Did you know BMW’s M6, a $102,000 behemoth of a coupe, has 400 horsepower V10? It looks like a rocket ship with 20” rims. Chevy has a new Camaro coming out that does what the Mustang, the Charger, and the PT Cruiser do – that is, relies on nostalgia to bring buyers back to American cars. I think it’s kind of lame.

That’s more or less what’s been happening. Oh yeah, and I completely embarrassed myself in class last week. So nothing has really changed.