A few months back I had a week go by where everything I touched broke. That's unusual for me. Nonetheless, it happened. Software didn't work, I went to clean up a PC and killed the motherboard, it was endless. It cost me a few hundred dollars to put things right, and then a few weeks later I picked up a new system board -- and went to a lot of trouble to find one that would support the same P4 and ram from the one I broke. Of course, this strange negative karma was still with me. When I put the old processor in the system board.....nothing. Not. A. Thing. Several hours later I found that I'd bent a couple of pins on the processor.

Fast forward to this week. I got a hell of a deal last week on a new board and processor combination. Not the latest and fastest, but fairly good. An Athlon 64 X2 dual core. Which - of course - required a power supply with an end connector I didn't have, so it cost me new power supply. Which delayed me getting things done, which were taking forever anyway because of some new software that just would not load.

All bad luck up to that moment, and then.... The good karma kicked back in.

The thing about good karma is that I'm much more used to it than the bad. Its a firefighter thing I think. We get automatic double-miles on good karma.

Within the last 24 hours, I've found two new books I want to read, go the new Athlon machine up and running, got the software that's been vexing me installed on both laptop and workstation, helped a friend get Asterisk working, figured out how to finish a key bit of work, and....... using an exacto knife managed to FIX the pins on the other processor and drop it into its motherboard. I've gone from having destroyed two machines to having two good new test platforms and having freed up a third. Since I only need ONE of these three to work, I'll keep the new dual core Athlon, sell the other two (an old Celeron 1.7 and a nice Pentium 4 HT 2.8 with a good video card) for enough cash to end up even after all is said and done.