Hello and thank you for accepting Rod’s Comeback in the next edition of Literal Translations. Love the site and the voting method is one-of-a-kind.

Here’s my bio:

John Neal lives, writes and teaches English in a small fishing village in Southern Spain. He previously worked as a real estate agent, bartender, insurance salesman, newspaper editor and served most of his early adulthood in the U.S. Marines.

Hi John,

We’re happy to have you.  I’ve been a software guy all my life.  Well - when I was in high school I used to ride around early Sunday mornings with my older brother delivering newspapers.  Does that count?  Now I’m involved with a production company and this website, aside from my day job as IT director at an Internet retailer that sells laptop parts (worldwide - check us out! laptopsforless.com).

Dave.

John,

That’s fascinating. I’d really love to read something about how you got to Spain. About what it’s like there. About how I can get a gig like that. The time I spent in Spain (as a tourist, decades ago) was very nice. Great people, great sites, nice beaches, beautiful girls.

Dave,

I’d very much like to get a laptop. Can you recommend something that’s very small and lightweight, does everything, and doesn’t cost a lot? Oh, and I need wireless, I guess. But primarily (as a writer) I need something I can take with me wherever I go.

Thanks,
Mikael Covey

Mike,

Your laptop wishes are a pipe dream.  Really, you don’t want one that does everything because you won’t use it enough.  To writeand look at Internet videos and pictures on websites, you can get a Sony Viao.  The trick with a laptop is to know how rough you’ll be with it (do you want to pay extra for a tough one and do you want to pay for an extended warranty and do you want accident coverage?) and how many different things you’ll do with it (if you plan to host development websites, compile software, edit videos, and analyze data, then you’ll want to spend a lot of money and do your own research), and how much you’ll carry it around (will its weight bother you?).

Faced with this problem myself, I rely on my wife’s cousin Gina because she loves the research and she’s pretty smart.  She uses a Toshiba Satellite so I got one too, but we are heavy users - photo editing, video editing, business applications, etc.  My wife also did a good amount of research and settled on a Sony Viao.  It’s lightweight but pretty powerful.  So really, I’m just parroting their recommendations because I haven’t done the research myself.  I did research the researchers though .