Progress

Thank [insert deity here] it's Friday.

It's somewhat bittersweet that I'm planning to meet up with some friends tonight. There's shit I want to get done. Plus, I'm running on 3 hours of sleep, so I may not be at my best.

Anyway, progress is being made on all those pesky fronts taking place in the real world. The cats were properly introduced last night and on the whole, it went quite well. Minimal hissing and growling, and no fighting. Good.

Computer tribulations continue. I still haven't recovered the drives I hosed, but I think it's just a matter of time. See, I started the scan on a virtual RAID, and it moved along nicely. Then it slowed to a crawl. Then it picked up. Then it stalled completely. Well, that was a waste of 20 hours.

So I decided to build my new machine regardless, and attempt recovery on it. I figure a Core Duo E6750 with 2 GB of DDR2-8500 might be a TOUCH quicker than an Athlon64 3500+ with 1 GB of DDR-266. So, after unravelling the tangle of cables and removing the old board, powersupply, and associated cards, I then reassembled them in another box. Then came the new stuff, which got assembled (damn that heatsink is a pain to get attached firmly), and put into the nice aluminium case. Arounds this time (1 am), my buddy called to see if he could come by. Lucky him I was up, and I knew he was calling from downstairs. So I had some company for a couple hours as I assembled, and he had a needed friendly face.

3am, a drive is nearly formatted (WTF? It's 160 GB drive and it's only formatting for 130?), and my friend leaves. I sit down and continue the XP installation (I'll get around to Vista eventually... let them fix it first). It installed quickly, but XP vanilla doesn't have wireless support, and for some reason the motherboard drivers/utilities disc wasn't reading properly either. Joy. I said, "screw it," hooked up the old machine and fired it up. Somehow I spent about an hour fiddling with both machines before just going to bed around 5. I had the foresight to move my alarms to 8am instead of 7. Yay.

So sometime this weekend, I need to finish getting XP up-to-date, recovering my drives, and making world made a better place (for me at least).

Needless to say, no poker content. That will come Sunday.

Vegas booking hit a snag when the airfare jumped $200 on my final booking click. My fault, I waited forever to actually book. Stupid me. But now there's a slightly less convenient option. If my friend every gets back to me, I can book it.