Damn! I’ve been hanging around the house too much since the weather outside is mostly SUCKY! I have been out to the property and I’ve moved some dirt around and collected some rocks and generally just farted around JUST to stay out of the house awhile. Got laundry and dishes done so I’m just sitting around watching “Dirty Jobs” and playing on the computer. Maybe I’ll get my PHP Programming book out….

Just ’cause I’m bored…

FINALLY back online! We had one hell of a Hail storm yesterday that lasted for about 4 minutes. Major Hail, thunder, lightning, some wind. I tried taking a picture with SWMBO’s camera but the batteries were dead. MY camera was in the truck and there was NO WAY I was going to step out into the storm. Was kind of cool!

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Anywho, our internet (and phone: The only bad thing about Vonage) went out. I bet I’ve rebooted the modem a hundred times since 1600 or so yesterday. It just would not connect. So this morning I hooked it up to a different cable connector in the wall and IT WORKS! Now I can check my e-mail! (All 7 e-mail addresses!!). Even better; my brother-in-law can continue to look for a job!!!
Finally got that ide controller card working and my other drives are working as usual. Had to hook the ’extra’ drives up to the secondary controller only and install the drivers for windows. Kind of slows down the boot process but it does work. Takes up 1 of 2 pci slots, but, oh well. Put a 4 port usb card in the other so I can plug all this other crap in. I’ll be damned glad when ’they’ finally get us wireless completely!
Winter has arrived early this year. The news folks are already talking about it snowing up to 15″ in one of the passes. It’s cool enough down here for me to have a small fire going in the woodstove. Bummer!!!

My computer quit working sometime last night. Damn! Can’t tell if it’s the power supply or the motherboard. (Turning it off and back on sometimes started the power supply but the motherboard didn’t seem to work and visa versa.) So, since this was the 4th time in 12 hours the computer just died (no warning or anything. It just turned itself off immediately) I went to Computer Sonic’s over by the South Center Mall (rained pretty hard both ways and took about 2 hours for the round trip) and bought me a new barebones system. It’s a 2.8ghz dual core system. Didn’t notice until I got home but the damned thing has only one (1) ide connector. Now how in the hell am I going to run my 4 drives at a time with only ONE (1) ide connector?!? So I made the trip to Motherboards Etc in Gorst and bought a PCI IDE adaptor. Wasn’t able to get it to work. So I switched my main drive and the dvd-burner to the only ide connector on the motherboard and booted it up. ’Cept it kept rebooting. So I booted with the windows XP disc and it told me my windows was corrupted. Had to reinstall windows. Damn! Took a couple of hours but I finally got it to working. Tomorrow I’m going to retry the ide controller card…. It figures all my data would be on my old E: drive and I can’t access it until I get multiple drives working. Damn!

This machine is pretty fast! ’Bout twice as fast as my old computer. With twice the memory (1 gig) too! Cool! Was able to run "Lock On" at full graphics mode and it worked perfectly. Well, except for me getting my butt kicked by two MIG-26’s. (But that was MY fault!) I’m impressed and will really like it when I get my other drives working. (I swap data drives out depending on what I’m doing.)

So, Hey! SWMBO! Thanks for letting me get this new system! I really appreciate it!

Season 7 premiere was too cool! I really enjoyed that they didn’t conclude the Bizzarro in the first 10 minutes of the show. Unfortunately we’re still going through all the Lana Angst (though she does look good as a blond!). The only real question I had was: When Clark hit the anti-Clark up into the air, WHO was the streak of red that carried the Bizzarro up into space? Hmmm… AND why didn’t they show how (Supergirl) came to Earth?

Other than that: Not much going on. It finally started raining this evening and that should last a couple of days. MAYBE thunderstorms Friday night and MAYBE up to 4 inches of rain in the Olympic Mountains. Figures I’d live fairly close up to the Olympic Mountains. Finally got cool enough to start the fire up again.

Trying to buy this unit from a company in China that you can put a hard drive full of movies converted to .avi format and it shows them on your television. It’s a HDD unit (???-3508). No computer required to play movies and show pictures on the tv. Cool.

And that’s it for tonight.