@ Victoria:

I did end up going to a Halloween party (or should I say skidding accross the highway) and wore a crappy store bought cowboy costume which I obtained the day before. It was super lazy, but actually looked as if I put some effort into it when I was standing next to a guy wearing a smurf hat and a blue Old Navy t-shirt and jeans. :P

@ icebrain:

Wow! That’s nice. Here in the USA (aka the internet third world) most ISP’s have data caps and open Wifi hotspots are virtually unheard of. :(

By the way, about your stupid neighbors: nowadays all our ISP only have “unlimited” connections¹, and the biggest one know uses Fonera routers for their clients, so if you have one too (either one of theirs, or bought from Fonera itself) and share your connection, you have free internet anywhere ;)
I was planning to contract a 3G plan for my laptop, but now that free APs are everywhere, it’s not worth it.

¹ there are some “reasonable usage policies”, but I know people who use 500GB+/month and their ISP doesn’t complain

Nope. Where I live we don’t celebrate it, except for the TV channels which schedule “spooky” films for that day (Monster House for the kids, some death thriller for the adults).

We did hear about that snowstorm there in the US; but in my town no one can remember the last time it snowed. To even be able to touch snow we need to drive 200 miles to the nearest mountain.

You, poor thing!

I had a blast on Sat – we had a corporate Halloween party, which basically meant that people got drunk wearing costumes, but it was fun anyway – there were many hand-made costumes that were really great. My look was commented on by some QC girl as ‘hey, I didn’t do much preparation either’ which in my case meant dress and shoes ordered specifically for the occasion, two hours in hair salon getting my ‘crazy hair’ look and an hour of make-up :) I guess, I was too subtle.

On Sun I turned into one of your stupid neighbors: I bought a new PC case with a more powerful built-in power supply (I’m getting a new display and a new video card), disemboweled my computer, started on putting all the stuff into the new case when I realized two things (and then a third – that I am stupid): a) the new case is too lopsided to carry the motherboard, and b) the old power supply that I had for 4 years is more powerful than the one I bought and is well suited for the new card.

Soo, the only good things to come from the day of tinkering are a) a clean PC and b) I finally installed a new DVD-RW (which I don’t need but people still ask me to burn something for them).

The new case goes back to the retailer, and I curse those QC who put the approval stamp on its bottom, because it’s like ~7mm lopsided on the inside.

Sorry for the rant, all my usual tech-people/rant-listeners are on vacation :)