How many computers DO you have?

A few years ago, Chapman asked me "How many computers DO you have in your house?" Good question. There is (1) Sloop, the new one that I built last fall (Athlon 64 3500+) inside the old chassis from Lensman, which is now a inoperable mobo+cpu waiting to be recycled. Then there is (2) Olpc, the new netbook, which I sadly don't use often enough because I rarely leave the house. (3) Dalek is the computer I built in 2001 that still serves as my backup desktop. (4) Mazer is a P3-800 laptop I keep around because Olpc doesn't have a VGA-out socket for presentations. I've loaned Mazer to the housmate until he de-viruses his own computer (windoze user, go figure---and Steve's a computer professional!). (5) Nimrod is an ancient Pentium laptop that I forgot I had until this year's housecleaning. It still works, and I intend to get rid of it at some point. Then there's my old laptop, Hiro2, which has been broken since before I fully paid for it; but we aren't counting nonfunctional computers.

So yes, I own 5 functional computers. This weekend I found out that Dalek, even though it has a motherboard and processor from 2001 and has a Radeon 9200 GPU from 2004 and is running Linux will run World of Warcraft. Not well, mind you, but usable. Now Shauna and I can play together in my house. We're such dorks.

I've got Dalek set up on my dining room table with a giant 9-year-old CRT monitor and an ethernet cable running across the floor into my room. It's okay because it's been so long since I've had more than two people eat at my dining room table anyway. The other possibility is to squeeze both computers onto my desk. But that would be crowded. We'd bump elbows.