Lost: A Sense of Proportion

I wanted a Sherlock wallpaper for my computer, but couldn't seem to find anything with the sorts of quotes I wanted. So, naturally, I asked my super-talented sister to make me one. And she did. And it is lovely. :D


(This is a cropped, downsized part of it, for better viewing on LJ.)

Sadly, it appears that I may be headed for impending dual hard drive failure. The figurative kind - I seem to be coming down with the same thing Nef's had. And the more literal variety - after my brother completely wiped and re-installed everything on my computer and confirmed everything was free of viruses and shiny and running correctly, everything seemed to be going great for a while. Unnntil I had another crash, much weirder than the ones I'd had previously. It didn't just lose things that I'd saved immediately before the crash, or was working on at the time, but separate files that I'd saved to the desktop some time earlier completely disappeared as well - it was like the stupid thing had amnesia regarding everything that'd happened for 3-4 hours before that point. Scanning confirms still no viruses that could be causing weirdness, so... I dunno. I'd hoped to get this laptop to last another six months to a year, but... starting to really doubt that's gonna happen at this rate. 

Between one thing and another, I'm really starting to get that itch for new technology again. *g* I'm actually seriously contemplating getting an Apple laptop this time around, much to my own surprise. I got so aggravated with our Macs when I was younger - I thought for sure I'd never want to go back to them after I got my first Windows laptop. But seeing how shiny Nef's Mac desktop has been, and looking at a few of the laptops in the store... hmm. 

On a totally unrelated note, a question for my various friends who live in other states/countries (which would be, um, all of you, I guess XD). I've noticed a growing trend of people who leave "to be" out of their sentences when writing. That is, they would say, "It needs fixed." or "It needs changed." The first few times I noticed it, I figured it was just an odd typo. But I've been seeing it more and more, even from people whose writing is not otherwise riddled with errors, and it's just... odd. And has been kind of driving me crazy. So I'm wondering if you all have any ideas. Is t just a particularly common mistake? Laziness? Or could it be a regionalism that I'm not familiar with? (scarvenartist, I think you mentioned a similar quirk in the way people talk where you are, but it seems to me that you said it was a bit different - i.e. that people would say "It needs wash." instead of just leaving out "to be." Or am I remembering that wrong?)