Today (or I should say yesterday) at work, everyone all of a sudden couldn't get their e-mail. And who's the IT guy who gets called in to fix stuff (but doesn't get to make a single IT purchase decision): me.

So I look at what's acting as our e-mail server, which I shall now dub "Lime Betty"*. Lime Betty is a green 233 mhz iMac, circa 1998 or something like that. She has 256MB of RAM and a 5GB hard drive that's storing messages for the entire company, and it's doing no more good cause its all full. And Lime Betty's running OS X 10.3.9, just one step away from the current release of Tiger (the latest version), and it gets even freakier that the only way that the guys before me could get a computer that old to even be able to run such an advanced operating system at all is by the user having to type cryptic commands at the blank gray Open Firmware (equivalent to the PC BIOS) screen upon booting up. And the whole time, the hard drive inside Lime Betty is chattering endlessly, desperately trying to make up for her lack of available RAM. Lime Betty's only saving grace is that she's a very becoming shade of lime jello green and was joy to look at.

And the thing is, my superiors are wondering why this machine all of a sudden stopped working. All these years they've been using this thing, and have never gotten something more reliable and new because of a pervasive "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" attitude.

Some times, I feel like I'm not working at an IT job, but at a fucking lemonade stand. At least they agreed to replace Lime Betty with a more modern but less visually attractive machine tomorrow.

• Lime Betty is a reference to a mysterious old 70's mainframe computer named "Black Betty" featured in a Dilbert TV episode that ran the whole company and that needed to be saved to keep the company afloat.

Long ago, I predicted that there was an untapped marked for virtual worlds where people could create their own stuff. More than a handful of geeks scoffed at mybelief, dissing stuff like VRML "it's not anything lie doom" "why would you want to build anything and not kill stuff", etc.

But I believed. And after all these years, I've finally found Second Life [link]http://www.secondlife.com[/link] I'm happy that reality is finally catching up to my ideas about the world. About damn time.

Building stuff out of legos kicks ass, and I really want to learn how to program cool stuff, because it sounds interesting and because you can actually make money at it.

My craziest idea would be recreating a Elmwood Strip/Village/whatever, but that would require a ton of $$$ to buy land with. Maybe I should settle for my slightly less crazy idea of creating a small (e:strip) area.

I will have to re-watch my Shrek DVD tonight; I keep having that Smash-mouth song running through my head, and I fear it won't stop till I see the movie.

On this day, I turn 31.

And thus I face the disturbing reality that I'm now closer to 40 than 20, and that I'm not allowed to have any more late nights out, fun, or sex until I divorce my first wife, buy an expensive sports car, and pick up the second trophy wife.

Of course, I've never been married, have never owned a minivan, and I'm generally the type of guy that trophy wives tend to avoid. I'm totally failing society's expectations of near-middle age mediocrity. And that's even more disturbing, because it puts me in a kind of limbo where I don't have any well-treaded paths to follow and no herd mentality to safely cling to and use to disavow any accusation of stagnation or complacency by saying "I was doing what everyone else was doing."

I've somehow ended up driving the bumper car out of the theme park. So now what?

In hindsight, I reallly should have talked to the blond girl in horn-rimmed glasses. I am such a wuss. The worst fate I can meet is, after all, the current situation I find myself in.

Upon being sober, I'm sure that none of this will make sense.