So that weekend was mostly ate up by a catastrophic pc failure.\u00a0 Really now, is there any other kind of pc failure?\u00a0 Nope, they’re pretty much all catastrophic.\u00a0 I came into the (home) office Friday morning to a blinking black screen, informing me that no boot disk could be found.\u00a0 Bummer.\u00a0 Not a good start to the weekend.\u00a0 I hopped on amazon and ordered a new drive with same day shipping, and when I got home from work that afternoon it was waiting on the porch for me.\u00a0 Pretty slick.\u00a0 A few things were learned over the course of this latest disaster.\u00a0 My pc backup software (Acronis True Image) is generally worthless.\u00a0 I’ve used it since 2010, faithfully upgrading to the latest version every year.\u00a0 It’s really the only software I’ve ever purchased, outside of Microsoft Windows & Office, and my anti-virus.\u00a0 Over all those years, I’ve never really used it.\u00a0 So this was the big test:\u00a0 I booted my new drive up to the rescue disk, clicked “restore image” and went to eat dinner.\u00a0 I came back to a screen not unlike the one I’d woken up to that morning.\u00a0 Fail.\u00a0 Guess I won’t be buying the next version.\u00a0 So, I spent the rest of my weekend building Windows install disks, hunting all over the house for various serial numbers, blah blah blah.\u00a0 So lame.\u00a0 Good news is I don’t think I really lost anything, as all my music, pictures, and documents are stored on another device.\u00a0 And as an added bonus, my new drive is faster than snot.\u00a0 Really fast snot, however fast that is.<\/p>\n
Notable events over the weekend included a trip to the dog park, and a cookout involving a really large steak.\u00a0 In chronological order, the steak came first on Saturday evening.\u00a0 We had friends over and I headed down to the grocery and bought a steak for us all to share.\u00a0 One steak for two couples?\u00a0 Cheaping out again there, Phil?\u00a0 Well, the one steak weighed in at a not unimpressive 3.8 lbs.\u00a0 Now THAT is a steak.\u00a0 Somewhere between a steak and a roast I’d say, actually.\u00a0 It took me over an hour to get that thing up to medium rare on the Weber, making dinner a bit late.\u00a0 It was worth it though, it came out very tasty.\u00a0 Then Sunday morning, we took Quinn to the dog park here in El Dorado Hills.\u00a0 Really not such a big event, but it was fun.\u00a0 We took his friend Renfield this time, in case there were no other puppies there to play, which was indeed the case.\u00a0 There was one other big goofy something-a-doodle, but Quinn was terrified of him.\u00a0 Little intimidated by the size difference I guess.\u00a0 He had fun though, and slept soundly beside us while we enjoyed lunch afterwards.<\/p>\n\n\t\t