Published on Friday, December 28, 2007 .
I wanted to do so much gaming this week and, well, I have 3 stars in Mario Galaxy. Granted, I’ve been playing in random hockey tournaments and doing some short runs and a lot of other good things with people so it’s not a wash by any stretch. I’ve also learned a crapton about Vista thanks to upgrading my brother’s Dell laptop from XP to Vista Ultimate and I just watched in amazement as it all crashed and burned in every way possible. I mean, I’ve been doing tech work since grade school and I’ve never seen anything go so awry. Boxing Day night turns into the next morning and my dad and I are scouring the net and trying every trick we know to try and salvage any scrap of my brother’s data possible.
Miraculously, through a massive team effort, the important stuff gets recovered and I had all of his music backed up on my 500GB Western Digital MyBook so we didn’t bother trying to find any of it. Then we did what we should’ve done in the first place which was wipe the whole system clean and start fresh. I hate upgrades. I backed up everything, formatted, then reinstalled XP on my tower this past summer just because ‘it was time’. My brother is pretty happy now though. His PC is running faster than ever and I knew he’d be a big fan of Aero so that’s working out great. I’m still kicking myself for not putting my foot down and insisting on a proper backup before the upgrade (bad geek, I know, trust me) but he was so cavalier about not needing anything on that HD that I assumed he had backups. Whoops. On the plus side, the crash course in Vista was nice and educational :)
Published on Monday, December 24, 2007 .
Yup, two words will forever describe Christmas Eve 2007 for our huge family get-together: Tiger Pot. I’ve googled but I can’t find the same model that caused such a stir and brought life back to an evening that had slowed more than a bit. The reason I cannot find an online record of said model probably has to do with the fact that this model is from a time before personal computers. I do not have the energy nor time to relay the story to you all right now and pictures are forthcoming — and even when I do it will probably be a “had to be there” sort of thing — but this was awesome, trust me :)
Published on Sunday, December 23, 2007 .
I went to bed last night at 10:30pm. I was asleep before 11pm. That never ever happens to me. Usually it takes an hour or three of tossing and turning before I’m actually out for the night. The main reason I drove home yesterday from 2:30-6am was to set my hours straight and it actually worked much better than I hoped. Friday was awesome, as I previously mentioned, and yesterday the Leafs even managed to beat the Panthers just in time so I could watch a sick setup by the Blackhawks’ incredibly hot Sharp beat the Senators in OT. I’m not sure which I enjoyed more :)
Man, Chicago is gonna have a great team in a few years with all the young kids they’ve got. Anyway, so I slept like a rock at the proper time for two nights in a row. Consequently, I got up this morning at 6am. I refused to get out of bed at that hour so I merely rested for an hour before giving up to go try and be productive (aka: playing with the new tablet). Now that my knee is rested and good to go I’m supposed to run 14-16k today. Seeing as I took my dogs out a 8am in the pouring rain for just a few minutes and I came back sniffling and sneezing and drenched to the bone, I’m not sure if that’s going to happen. Kyra is supposed to come over after lunch so we can attempt to bake some gingerbread but that gives me many hours to kill beforehand.
Let’s see. I can run and get sick or read my next semester textbooks or wake up my brother and play Wii games or who knows what else. Actually, the first thing I should do is get my iriver ready to run just in case I find a lull in this storm so I can at least get a quick 5k in. This is important since my first actual race is a 5k on December 31st.
Published on Saturday, December 22, 2007 .
Seriously. Now my brother wants it for his laptop just because he’s a fan of the look. As for the music thing I ended up going with iTunes. I used to only use iTunes 5 but that breaks Aero so I finally went for 7.5. It’s alright. A lot of my old complaints were taken care of and because this dual core system is much beefier than my X41 it doesn’t drag everything down when it’s running. Hooray.
Published on Friday, December 21, 2007 .
Hmm, let’s see here. I arrived home around 6am, slept until noon, enjoyed my favourite Japanese restuarant for lunch, tortured my brother with Mario Galaxy and Olympics while he played his guitar, and had dinner with my family at a nice Greek restaurant. Oh, and I got to mess around with a new tablet with Vista (Lenovo X61, Vista Business) and I now have a 2GB iriver clix to replace my two tiny RCA ones*. I also feel just about ready to pass out and that’s actually a good thing since I flipped my hours these past weeks with studying and then random adventures. Now it looks like I’ll be able to get back on track and sleep at night for a change.
So far I haven’t done much with the tablet except for remove Norton and update to SP1 as well as clean up the zillion odd icons that ruin the taskbar. Tomorrow I’ll start moving over stuff from my X41 and see whether I like Vista or will end up sticking with XP for a while longer. My tower will definitely stay XP for a good solid while but I can experiment more with my tablet seeing as I don’t do anything critical on it aside from school work and light gaming. I kinda want to start it all now but I know that’s a recipe for disaster since I’m barely conscious.
*I have one 512 USB stick that I use for walking around campus but it drove me nuts on long runs because it would generally die at the worst times and there was nothing I could do about it. So I picked up a cheap 1GB one specifically because it uses AAA batteries. Now if it dies on a run I just swap in the spare and the beat goes on. Hopefully this iriver will survive for 20k+ runs!
one more thing: What do you use to organize and play thousands of songs? I used to alternate between iTunes on my tower and WinAmp on my tablet but I’m willing to try out alternatives.
