We’re inching ever closer to the end of the holiday season.\u00a0 My sanity remains intact thus far, or at least as much as it was before the holidays.\u00a0 One pseudo-Christmas and the New Year remaining, and then I can get back to the predictable drudgery of my normal schedule.<\/p>\n
Friday was a generally unremarkable beginning to the long weekend.\u00a0 We were let out of work early, and I spent the rest of the afternoon running errands;\u00a0 Out to Microcenter to do a little last-minute shopping, swung by the Scooter shop to see if my helmet was in, (which it wasn’t… One of my co-workers had the rather innovative idea to paint my head with shoe polish in the meantime,) and dropped my car at the shop to get inspected.\u00a0 After all that was done, I spent the rest of the evening putting together my new PC, which was my Christmas present from me.\u00a0 It came together very nicely, if not exactly as planned.\u00a0 For those who care, which I would imagine are very very few, I shall detail the specs of this super-duper new machine.\u00a0 After much shopping, research, and gnashing of teeth, I decided on an Abit KN9 Ultra<\/a> motherboard.\u00a0 I’m sure most of you have already moved to the next paragraph so I won’t waste keystrokes on how and why I finally came to that arduous decision.\u00a0 The rest of the components were a bit easier to select;\u00a0 most were picked by the all-important “on sale” criterion.\u00a0 For storage, it has two 320 gig SATA-II Seagate drives, plus an extra 80 gig SATA-I generously donated by Martin for some backup space.\u00a0 For the rest, I went with an AMD 2 GHz dual-core processor, 2 gig of DDR2 RAM, a 512 MB Geforce 7600GS video card, and two 18x DVD burners.\u00a0 All of this almost comical overkill is housed in a very nice Antec P180B<\/a> case with a 500 watt Ultra power suppy.\u00a0 I added a few other niceties also, like a built-in memory card reader and a CPU fan that rivals our home central air unit in both size and cooling capacity.\u00a0 If I wake up tomorrow and decide I want to be a serious gamer or maybe a graphic designer, I’ll be ready to go in the PC department.\u00a0 Until then, I will be the proud owner of a machine capable of the fastest game of solitaire in the neighborhood.\u00a0 The only “glitches” encountered in the project were the hard-drive setup and the Linux install.\u00a0 I had intended to set up the two 320’s in a raid 0 array, mostly because I like saying “raid array.”\u00a0 It was acting a bit odd in that setup though, so I scrapped that part.\u00a0 I had also originally planned to put a Linux install on the 80 gig drive, and dual-boot it with Windows, which would let me get rid of my Linux box that sits in the basement.\u00a0 This turned into a several-hour debacle and a non-booting PC though, so I ended up giving up on that too.<\/p>\n If you managed to power through that stretch of tedium, that brings us to Saturday.\u00a0 Most of the day was spent restoring stuff to the new PC, and tweaking it for optimal performance.\u00a0 Which is to say, jacking it all up and then trying to get it back to working order.\u00a0 Sigh.\u00a0 After a generally wasted day, we crossed the river and hit the Martin’s Christmas party.\u00a0 It was… Loud.\u00a0 I have known quieter evenings at the Brooksider.\u00a0 Oh well, all in the name of festivity.\u00a0 I did enjoy lots of good food, including some almost-award-winning pork and a passable effort at a brisket.\u00a0 I slunk off a bit early in the evening, leaving Donette to fend for herself in the gift exchange.<\/p>\n Sunday I woke up nice and early and threw a brisket on the smoker, in preparation for the Christmas dinner.\u00a0 That was a pretty effective day-killer;\u00a0 Cold-weather smoking takes a bit more attention I guess.\u00a0 It ended up taking 12 hours, so not much else was accomplished during the day.\u00a0 We had the grand idea to watch a few Christmas classics for evening entertainment, but were quickly reminded that they suck, so we went to bed.<\/p>\n Monday we got up bright and early and dug into all our gifts.\u00a0 I got a new PC, some new kitchen knives, and a new shirt!!!\u00a0 The surprise was somewhat tempered by the fact that I’d purchased all this for myself in the previous weeks, but it was exciting all the same.\u00a0 (Santa did leave me some goodies in my stocking, but I can’t go into that for fear of having to share.)\u00a0 The puppies got stockings full of toys, which they promptly destroyed, and Kane got a snoot full of catnip.\u00a0 Donette got everything she wished for too, which was yet another year of marital bliss and a steam cleaner.\u00a0 Score!!\u00a0 Later in the afternoon we headed north (again…) for Christmas with Donette’s family.\u00a0 After quite a large gift exchange we enjoyed an awesome BBQ dinner; Ribs, beef, and pork with all the sides.\u00a0 Perhaps not exactly the traditional holiday fare, but I’ll take some ‘que any day.\u00a0 My second overloaded plate was my undoing… I was thoroughly uncomfortable for the rest of the day, if in a contented kind of way.\u00a0 I wound down the holiday down at the Brooksider, watching the football game.\u00a0 Unfortunately, the sole Miami touchdown proved to be the undoing of my Fantasy Football season.\u00a0 Although my team was on an 8-game winning streak, and favored by a whopping 28 points to win it all, every one of my players managed to pick this week to go on an uncharacteristic touchdown drought.\u00a0 Arrrgghhhh!!!\u00a0 Oh well, second place still pays better than\u00a0last, I guess.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" We’re inching ever closer to the end of the holiday season.\u00a0 My sanity remains intact thus far, or at least as much as it was before the holidays.\u00a0 One pseudo-Christmas and the New Year remaining, and then I can get back to the predictable drudgery of my normal schedule. 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