It's job interview time again. I haven't lost my job, at least not yet, but I'm not waiting around to see if I'm going to. I'm hitting pavement, talking to potential employers, whether they're connected to what I'm doing now or not.

So, it was off to the mall to buy some clothes this weekend for the interview because all my dress clothes are from 1991. They fit (I wore them to my last interviews in 2005), but when your clothes are old enough to vote, it's probably time for something new.

So my Samsung CLP-300 laser printer developed a fake paper jam. I tried to print yesterday and got nothing but a paper jam message after the click that usually precedes the paper feeding through. I looked inside all the covers, even flipping the printer over multiple times, looking for that stray bit of paper munging up the works.

I found nothing. But I needed to print some resumes. So I fixed it.

So my wife wanted to replace the handles on the pantry doors. She went to Lowe's, picked out some handles, and brought them home.

The screws that came with them were too short. So I went to Home Depot (it's two minutes away and open late on Sundays) and bought replacements. I learned something.

I finally got Windows XP installed on what's going to be my mother in law's dual-core Intel Atom computer. I've spent some more time with it, and it's a good board, as long as you're willing to live with its limitations.

[Michael Schaerer's] life didn't turn out the way fans expected, but chances are neither did theirs.

In the early 1990s, Michael Shaerer was the frontman for Pale Divine, the biggest band in St. Louis. They played sold-out shows on Laclede's Landing, they had a record deal with Atlantic Records, and the radio stations even played some of their stuff sometimes.

But Atlantic didn't promote the CD, the CD ended up in cutout bins, the band eventually broke up, and that was that.

I was never able to get my mother in law's computer to misbehave, but my son was. He'd crawl up to it, press whatever buttons he could find, and invariably it would reboot and give beep codes.

So I decided the best bet would be to drop in a new system board. I went against all my usual practices and bought an Intel.

I've been seeing news segments and stories about how people are choosing not to replace things, but rather, repair them, saving money in the process, but hurting the big-box stores as well.

I can see how this could be a good thing in the long run, though.

I'm fixing up my mother in law's Compaq Presario S5140WM. She bought it about five years ago, a few weeks after her daughter and I started dating. It's been a pretty good computer for her, but lately it's been showing signs it might be overheating.

I took the shotgun approach, replacing pretty much everything that I would expect to be at or near the end of its life at five years.

Another year, another cordless telephone/answering machine.

I bought a cordless phone to replace an aging and failing 2.4 GHz model this week. Our luck with modern phones makes me long for the old days.

I like the old Western Electric 500 (also known simply as "The Bell Phone") because it was specifically designed not to break.

Vehicles are a frequent topic of discussion on the various O and S gauge train forms. At times these discussions can get rather heated.

Since use on train layouts is rarely the objective of the companies making various diecast vehicles, there's no true right answer to what one should or shouldn't use. This is my personal philosophy. Take it for what it's worth.