The monitor on my laptop cracked. Again. Bastard. (For the record, I literally did nothing to make it crack in the first place. One night it was fine, the next morning it was cracked.) I can now use less than half of the screen, which means, I’m in the market for a new laptop.

Here’s what I want:

• optical drives
• thin and light,
• PC,
• a price that won’t make spending $500 on a new monitor for this one seem like a good idea,
• durability
• No hidden surprises like that the Vaio screen commonly cracks–which I didn’t find out until, you know, my screen cracked.

Just, ARRRRGH!

I already got advice from my brilliant and amazingly talented cousin on what she thinks, but I’m interested in what the range of advice people can give me.

I want a camera that lets me fiddle (which I haven’t really done since I broke my film SLR about 5 years ago), but I also want a camera where I can see something, decide to take a pic, get the pic, then take 50 thousand more pics, all in about 3 seconds (ok, maybe not quite).

I’m also curious if y’all also have pocket size cameras you take other places, and, when traveling, how you keep yourself and your camera safe.

And any other little details you might want to share.

THANKS!

So, I need advice and here’s what I’m thinking:

I don’t want blogger because, well, google already has access to too much of my life. Whether or not I think they will use that information is pretty much irrelevant to the fact that it makes me uncomfortable to have so much of my life dependent on one company.

Don’t want insanejournal or one of those because the names are just too unprofessional.

I like the idea of WordPress.com, but you can’t friends lock entries. You can password protect them, but I prefer that people who aren’t permitted to read certain posts don’t know that there’s a post there that they can’t read. This may be a dealbreaker.

I like the idea of WordPress.org (there are plugins to solve that irritating no friends lock thing), but then I have to pay for hosting, and none of them are cheap enough. $7/mo is a lot more than the $14/year or whatever I was paying lj.

Vox.com might be ok? Has anybody heard anything about it? It’s owned by six apart, and I don’t know if I want to deal with them again–or more to the point, with whoever they sell vox to next week or next month.

Any other ideas, oh geniuses?

Advice, please?