This week I laid down another small fistful of dollars at the local CompUSA and walked out with Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne, the expansion pack to Blizzard Entertainment's legalized digital addictive substance. First thing to note: it's been a while since I played the original Warcraft III, and I was no block-rockin' Sun Tzu then, either. Any skizzills I might have had are now rustier than Genghis Khan's cast-iron swimming trunks. Second thing to note: man, if I hadn't been coveting one of those new G5s before, I certainly am now. Playing super-graphics-intensive video games on a two-year-old PowerBook is painful.

Every two years I get the New Computer Itch, which is about how long it takes for the state of the industry to double itself on me. My last desktop was a dual-200MHz 604e DayStar Millennium (which I named Eliot), followed by a PowerBook G3/400 (dubbed Kerouac), which was then replaced with a PowerBook G4/667 (christened Gandalf). My eye is now on a dual-2GHz G5, and yes, I'm considering buying a tower instead of another laptop, even though I swore I would never do that again. Why? I'll show you why:

That's why. Sure, I won't be able to afford buying three monitors at once, especially not on my freelancer income in this economy. But even if I just get my hands on the center 20" monitor, it'll be a lot more screen real estate than this 14" PowerBook monitor. Then, as I add the other two on later, I can utilize them in this app I'm planning to build. It will be a thing of beauty if I can get it to work, a real, honest-to-God command center for the creative/small-business-owner/world-conquerer type.

So I've got the itch and I've got the blueprints. Now all I need (aside from the massive bling bling necessary to finance this) is a name. Got any ideas?