One of my many gifts from the holiday was a long-sought-after hard drive upgrade.  Not just any ol’ hard drive though;  I got one of the latest-greatest Solid State Drives.  While generally having a much smaller capacity and much high price tag than a traditional drive, the new SSD’s are also considerably faster and, having no moving parts, totally silent.  These two things made it a perfect fit for my home theater PC, a Lenovo Q150.  So, after much comparison shopping and user-review reading, I decided on the Samsung 470 series drive, 128 gig model.  That doesn’t sound like a whole lot of space in these days of multi-terabyte drives, but it’s more than enough for the computer I put it in, as I only use it to surf the web and stream movies.

The drive replacement wasn’t quite as easy as I anticipated, but then nothing seems to be easy these days.  For one thing, the directions for opening the case were entirely wrong.  The best I could figure out from googling the issue was that Lenovo knows the manual is wrong and they are going to update it someday.  Isn’t that helpful.  Following somebody’s advice of “use a guitar pick,” I finally got it apart by prying it open with one of my many Chopper-Shopper cards.  (I knew those things would come in handy some day.)  Once open, it was quickly apparent the instructions for removing the drive were wrong also, but I’d pretty much given up on reading the directions by then anyway.  I got the new drive installed finally though, and even managed to put the case back together without any breakage.

After confirming everything worked on the new drive, I set about putting Windows back on it.  My plan was to install Windows 7 from scratch using the DVD’s I’d bought a few years ago, and then use the serial number that came with the computer to activate it.  This plan, not entirely surprisingly, did not work.  For whatever reason, I couldn’t activate the Windows install.  So, rather than spend a whole lot of time trying to figure out why, I switched to plan B, which was to image the old drive over to the new one.  This strategy, after a little trial and error, eventually worked out.  I have a little kit that lets you hook up drives to USB ports, so first I got that all working.  Once it saw both drives, I tried to use Norton Ghost to copy everything over.  They had included this software with the new drive, presumably just for this purpose, but it didn’t work at all.  It complained about the different partition sizes on the two disks, and wouldn’t let me duplicate an external drive to an internal.  I cursed it for a while, then switched over to Acronis 2012, which I happened to have purchased recently, and it worked quite flawlessly.  Once it finished copying, I booted up the new drive and took it for a test drive.  It works quite fabulously.  Noticeably quieter, and the speed difference is rather remarkable.  They also run cooler than a traditional drive, so hopefully it makes my little mini-pc last longer too, as I leave it running all the time.  As long as it lasts the duration of the supposed 3 year warranty, I am quite pleased with the upgrade.

I have successfully survived another Christmas Season.  A rather pleasant one at that, I must admit.  So caught up in the revelry was I that it appears I forgot to update this yesterday.  That leaves me somewhat at a loss to summarize the weekend, as the extra day is more than my aged memory can cope with.  Friday, as a matter of fact, it a total goner;  I’ll have to start with Saturday.

So, Saturday we were fortunate enough to end up with the Munkir’s tickets to the Chiefs game.  We were also fortunate enough to have these tickets on what must have been the nicest weather we’ve seen on Christmas Eve in history.  Honestly.  I’m not interested enough to actually verify this claim, but I can’t imagine it’s ever been nicer.  We didn’t do the whole tailgate experience despite the weather though, that’s just too much hassle.  We did actually stay for the entire game though, it was quite exciting.  (As exciting as a disappointing overtime loss can be anyway.)

Sunday, if you weren’t aware, was Christmas Day.  We had the “Kenagy Family Christmas” last weekend, so this was “Morelock Family Christmas” time.  I fried up a turkey for dinner this year, which came out pretty well.  May have overcooked it a little bit, but that’s better than raw I suppose.  Our friend Susan joined us for dinner also, which was festive.  After eating an enormous meal and opening presents, everybody enjoyed a few card games.  Well, everybody but me anyway;  I abstained from the gambling shenanigans.

Yesterday I had the day off work.  I didn’t spend it particularly wisely, but it was OK.  It struck me that all the recent holiday feasting had left me with the makings of a decent pot of gumbo, so I spent the better part of the day working on that.  Came out pretty darn tasty too.  I did take a break from watching the pot simmer to head down and watch the MU game, or the first half anyway.  Everybody was still all amped up with Christmas spirit.  I sat out on the back deck with a few guys and rehashed the holidays, enjoyed a decent football game, then headed home and had a tasty gumbo dinner.

Teaser:  Tune in later this week for a riveting informational post about my brand new hard drive!!

Ohhh, I don’t feel so whippy.  The first cold of the year.  Ohhhhh.  Yesterday I was too agonized to even type;  Today is marginally better.  At least I made it through the weekend before crashing and burning, and with any luck will fully recover before the coming weekend.

I started off last weekend with a trip down to the Brooksider.  Haven’t been there in a while, and they were having their annual “customer appreciation” party, so it sort of came together for me.  I didn’t stay too crazy late though, not remarkably.

Saturday we had an early Christmas get-together out at Mom’s.  Lots of delicious food, nice weather, and presents for me.  All good things.  As little Teagan hasn’t gotten much exercise lately, I even opted to take her along with us.  (Surprise, everybody!!)  She did very well actually, maybe a touch overwhelming with the youngest niece but at least she didn’t jump all over everybody.  She scored some presents too, which kept her occupied.  (So did Kane but he had to wait until we got home to open his.)  We were out there most of the afternoon, then headed back home to hunker down.  We spent our evening playing “picture match” on the Wii, obliterating our previous high score.  Wild night at the Kenagy house!!!

Sunday I was a bit sluggish;  Felt the cold kicking in.  I did make the long trek out to Shawnee Mission Park with the dog for some playtime.  I’m sure that didn’t contribute positively to my waning health, but it was a decent day out so I figured what the heck.  We had a pretty good time.  Teagan took her first few plunges into the lake, which she didn’t seem totally adverse to, but she didn’t strike me as a very strong swimmer either so we limited that to a few tosses of the tennis ball.  We did have to cut our recess time a little short though when she busted her lip open playing fetch with a hard rubber ball.  She was quite oblivious to the injury, but having her bounce all over the park with a bloody froth all over her jaws didn’t seem like the best of ideas so we called it a day.  By the time we got back to the house my illness was definitely kicking in, so we spent the rest of the day on the couch watching football.  Not unlike any other Sunday really.

Looks like the season of holiday parties is upon us.  Full fiesta mode.  Nonstop spirited celebration even.  I eschewed my regularly scheduled trip to the Brooksider on Friday and headed over to our friend Susan’s house for her semi-annual Christmas party.  This used to be an annual event, then was changed to semi-annual, then completely nullified for some period of time.  Since she hosted it again this year, I’ll go back to calling it “semi-annual” for the time being.  It was quite a return to its former days of glory too.  We shut the party down, much to Donette’s dismay.  Hey, I was on a roll, gotta go with those rare occasions.  I don’t know what time Susan finally threw us out, but it was crazy late.  (“Late” on my time-table being anything after 9:30.)

After my wild night out, I slept in late Saturday morning.  (“Slept in” on my time-table being after 5:30.)  I knocked off a few menial chores around the house, then Teagan and I drove out to Shawnee Mission Park for a little exercise.  Despite being relatively close to us, the drive out there took for-freaking-ever.  I was quite out of sorts by the time we finally made it.  And, if I wasn’t rattled enough, I couldn’t find the off-leash area once we finally got there.  Man, that place is huge.  I finally gave in and called a buddy who steered me to the right place.  Once we finally got there, I think it was worth the trouble.  Lil’ Teagan had a big time running around.  One part of it backs up to a lake, and she took a few tentative dips in the water.  Had I thrown her ball out into the lake, I’m pretty sure she would have swam out and got it, but we’ll save that test for some warmer weather.  Most of the time we just played fetch, which is her favorite game.  (To the point of obsession, one might say.)  Granted, we can play fetch right down the street at Penn Valley park, but there was a lot more grass at this place.  (Penn Valley, being much smaller, is pretty much all mud and…  Other stuff.)  Having sufficiently worn out the pup, I went back home and picked up Donette, and we headed out to another Christmas party.  It was another fine event, and I got to see a bunch of people I hadn’t seen in a long time.  We didn’t make it quite as late though, I think I was still a bit worn out from the Friday night revelry.

Sunday, I was about half tempted to drive back out to the dog park.  She certainly did have a big time out there, and I don’t think there are going to be many warm days left.  But, in the end, I couldn’t take the drive again, so we just hunkered down for some football watching.  Probably should have opted for the dog park, as the few football games I got at the house weren’t exactly entertaining.   Just to pass the time, we did whip up a big pot of chili and lit the fireplace for the first time in our dozen years there.  I was pleased to find the house still intact this morning when we woke up.  (Well, not really, but I have to say that for insurance reasons.)

So, the wife has been out of town since Friday evening.  It’s a semi-well-known fact that, left to provide my own amusement, I will sit on the couch and stare at the TV for days on end.  That makes for mighty slim pickings on the update material, especially when you factor in our lack of cable TV.  The extent of my weekend entertainment consisted of meeting a few guys down at the Brooksider for a few hours Saturday afternoon.  Oh, and I cleaned out the garage a little bit.  Aside from that, I logged 32 episodes of “Gunsmoke” and “The Rifleman,” 14 bad Netfix movies, and 6 college football games.