Remember, you only have until Friday, May 11 to save money registering for Book Expo America here. And if you haven't downloaded our free Unshelved comic about BEA, why not? Read it and you'll find out that at BEA we'll be raffling off a free grab bag containing one of everything we sell!

As longstanding readers of this blog know, I go through computer angst fairly regularly. After several false starts I ended up with a Fujitsu P7010D ultraportable, a laptop I truly loved and used happily for almost three years. But that computer was just a little underpowered for the Age of Vista, and frankly the teeny tiny screen was starting to be hard on my 40-year-old eyes. So when it crashed and died on me a few months ago I didn't try to hard to ressurect it. I just let my day job outfit me with a ThinkPad Z61t, a midsize laptop I am quite happy with. But it doesn't really excite my passions, as a laptop should. Turns out I like a computer I can grab and go, and my current model doesn't really fit that bill.

Yesterday HP announced this beauty, the Compaq 2710p, an ultraportable tablet pc. Pretty, no? It's not available until July, and I'm not really in the market right now anyway, but it definitely raises the bar. I'm very curious to see what Apple comes out with for its rumored 12" ultraportable.

Do cartoonists really need the best laptop technology available? Probably not, but don't tell Gene (or my wife). I can easily justify a the fast Photoshop machine that is my desktop, because it's what I use to draw the strip. The laptop is a little less defensible. But I do travel a lot, and having lots of battery life, and portability, makes a difference in my life. We all have our pathologies.