One of the most unique authors I’ve encountered of late is Seth Grahame-Smith. While I’m not about to go out and buy custom mugs with his name on them just yet, you have to admire his creativity.

His first novel caught my eye but never really compelled me to buy; Pride and Prejudice and Zombies was an adaptation of the Jane Austen classic – he credits her as co-author – with a strong zombie-fighting subplot mixed in by Grahame-Smith. It was an interesting concept but, not being an Austen fan, it was a bit lose on me.

His latest is Abraham Lincoln – Vampire Hunter, and looks far more promising. Disguising literary classics and history lessons as occult fad fiction is a unique take, and hopefully Grahame-Smith can get a couple more out before others catch on and start flooding the market with copycat fiction of lesser quality.

The concept of making Lincoln a vampire hunter is both hilarious and a cagey strategy to make the 1860s US president relevant to the Twilight-era of teenagers. Well done, sir.

With spring teasing that it might stick around after a somewhat early appearance this year, many folks are thinking about fun stuff like outdoor furniture. As for me, I’m excited that I finally have a new laptop!

Sure, my desktop can’t seem to stay fixed and out of Geek Squad customer service for more than a few hours at a time over the last couple months. And granted, I’ve been on an old laptop since then.

How old? Well, try Windows XP, 512MB of RAM, a single-core processor and an 80GB hard drive on for size. Heck, it only sports USB 1.0! Like an old workhorse, it still works, but it ain’t running the Kentucky Derby anymore either. Still, it’s hard to hate a durable Toshiba.

And my new laptop? Built for speed! Try Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit, 4GB of RAM, a dual-core processor and a 500GB hard drive with USB 2.0! (Sure, USB 3.0 would have been nice, but virtually no one’s adopted that yet…)

Anyway, once I get the thing loaded up with the proper tools and humming, I’ll be golden! Gotta love my new Asus laptop!