I’m not one to hold back my curiosity very long, so when a friend advised me not to try smoking Salvia I simply had to buy some and find out for myself why.

First things first: don’t buy Salvia if you don’t like strong smells. Salvia really does smell like a week old dead animal in the sun. Well, it doesn’t smell like rotting flesh but it does smell really, really bad.

I got my Salvia from one of the many online retailers that specialize in the drug. It came in the form of crumbly black flakes which I was to put in my pipe. Smoking Salvia is not pleasant in itself and the taste is pretty bad (though nowhere near as bad as that smell…).

The high you get from smoking Salvia is pretty unique, and it hits you almost immediately. From a tingling sensation in your limbs to complete mess up, back to normality again, the trip takes around 8 minutes to run its course. Once you’ve finished you’ll notice that there are no ill effects associated with smoking Salvia.

At least there are no ill effects that we know of. Clearly scientists do not know for sure that there are no long term effects that may come back to haunt us. For now I’m satisfied that there are no short term effects!

Tangent, who mainly provides computer solutions to education, government, corporate, and healthcare markets, have announced Evergreen 17, a “green” and “ultra power efficient” touch screen PC.

According to Tangent the Evergreen 17 only consumes 24 watts, which is 72% less than the Energy Star 4.0 rating requires.

“Not only do users experience computing with a touch screen PC in a space-saving form factor, they also get industry leading power efficiency at 24 watts and 72% less energy usage than Energy Star 4.0 limits,” said Douglas Monsour, Tangent’s President. “This translates into cost-savings while, at the same time, helping the environment.”

The Evergreen 17 touch screen computer comes with the Via Eden 1.0 GHz (fan-less) processor or the ViaC7 1.50 GHz (low noise fan), hard drive capacity from 60GB to 250GB and up to 2GB RAM memory. Each Evergreen 17 is equipped with a high brightness TFT panel and resistive touch. It weighs15.8 lbs. and is only 2.25 inches in depth. The operating system is either Windows XP Professional (or Windows XP Embedded for server and web-based computing) or a Linux operating system.

The Evergreen 17 starts at $1,195 and comes with a one-year parts and labor warranty. The touch screen computer is available now over at www.tangent.com.