Be Sure to Drink Your Ovaltine

I will be offline for a few days. Better things to do than hang around here writing mundane blog entries. We are heading down to see Mickey and Donald for a few days.

When we made the trip a few years ago, I took my laptop with me. The only time I took it out of the bag was at the airport. This year I will leave it at home rather than lug it all over the southeast. Surely I can last a few days without internet access.

See you in the funny papers.

The Elves are dressed in leather ...

So my seester has run out of room on the old HD and wanted to replace it with a larger one. The current was a 60 gig-ger. We went to Best Buy on the 24th and obtained a new 250 gig-ger to replace it.

Her computer had been acting up so I decided a clean install on the new HD was the correct route rather than attempting to backup/restore the existing image.

After dropping in the new HD and booting the Win-XP-Home CD, the thing booted installed a few drivers and then BSOD'ed. Something about 'pci.sys' yada yada yada. Google was fine enough to tell me I needed to install XP SP2 (service pack 2 for the mere mortals) and all would be excellent.

Having no SP2 disk, I spent a few minutes reading up on slipstreaming SP2 and proceeded to make a new Win XP Home SP2 disk? This requires using an real XP disk, downloading the SP from MS, and downloading a few more utilities to extract a boot image from the XP disk, and create a bootable disk from the existing disk with the SP integrated into it. I got most of my useful info from a site called "theeldergeek" or somethink like that. Very useful that site was.

The truth of the matter is I tried a few things before I took the slip stream approach. None worked. Very frustrating at times. When I finally got around to making my own disk, the first disk would not boot (due to a parameter in Nero Rom which should have been a '4' being a '1'). My bad.

Messing around with computers can certainly be trying. There are several times during the whole process I was reminded of a song by Spinal Tap. Christmas with the devil, in this case the devil is Terry's computer.

Things are now rapidly progressing towards various stages of completion. Next comes the hunt for all the required drivers to get that laptop back in shape for the Happy New Year.

Happy Christmas

We had an enjoyable Christmas. Christmas eve consisted of a short service followed by dinner with the family including my sister and in-laws at our house. After dinner we continued our tradition of opening all the presents. Not to worry, we still have stocking to go through on Christmas morning.

Christmas Days consisted of a trip to Albertville to have lunch with G's father's extended family.

Tomorrow I will be heading over to Atlanta with my sister and my brother's two sons. We are going to load all of T's stuff into a U-Haul truck and drive it back to HSV. That should make for a nice short day.

Merry Holidays to everyone.

It got cold again!

I am still working on painting the cabinet doors. Twelve doors total. I decided to paint them before hanging them to keep the paint off the hardware. One coat of primer, two coats of paint was the plan. I have finished the primer and the first coat of paint. I plan on making more progress tomorrow.

The Winter Break of Rick

After finishing my final final on Tuesday, I found myself in a unique position. I had nothing to do. Nothing.

When your a student there is always an assignment due. My normal modus operandi is to just work on whatever is due next. Well the calendar said I was done. No more school for 3 weeks. Awesome. I could get use to this.

Actually I do have a few things on the calendar in the next three weeks: Celebrate Christmas, Trip to Disney World, and Celebrate the New Year.

Things will be rough for me for the near future. Think of me as your working through your daily grind.

Yesterday I made my periodic pilgrimage to the dentist. As I was getting strapped into the chair to begin the genetic experimentation - wait that is a different story.

After sitting down on the chair, the hygentist gave me a warm next pillow. It felt really nice (it was cold outside) on the back of my next and I said so. She asked if I wanted to turn on the massage/heat features of the chair. I had always declined in the past but thought the additional heat might be nice. And the chair went brrrrrrrrmmm. Nice.

I was kidding around about how nice it was to be pampered at the dentist and the hygentist asked me if I had ever had the hand dip. She said I absolutely had to try it if I was feeling adventurous. Next thing you know, I have had my hands dipped in warm paraffin and I am wearing big white mittens.

For the rest of the day, my hands smelled like lavender.

And then I got my teeth cleaned.

Last Tuesday I left the house headed for school in the Miata running on fumes. The gas station I have been frequenting is about halfway between home and school. Once I arrived there, I discovered I had left my wallet at home. The tank being empty, I realized I didn't have enough gas/time to head to back the house. I also didn't have enough gas to get to school.

After briefly panic'ing for about 7 seconds, I collected all the change from the car and went inside the station to proudly request $1.50 on pump number 8. The price of regular was $1.55 per gallon which bought me most of a gallon. With my most of gallon of gas I was able to make it to school and back.

Two days later, I was in the Miata again, once again heading for school. This time with my wallet in my pocket, I stopped at the gas station and filled up the tank. Here is the amazing part. I filled up the tank for less than $20. To be more precise it cost $18.99. Gas mileage on this tank was down: about 28 MPG, but still nothing to complain about there.

It has been a busy busy week. During times like this I usually have a lot to write about unfortunately most of it never gets written.

This semester of school is almost over. I took my final for the second of three classes yesterday afternoon. The final final will be on Tuesday.

Over the last week I have managed to effectively procrastinate on several occasions by building a set of wall cabinets for the garage. I build three cabinets spanning a total of 12 feet. Hopefully the extra storage space will allow me to finally get the work bench cleaned off.

That is all for now. I am heading to the high school to sub in a Spanish class. (School started two hours late today due to possible inclement weather. We all knew it wouldn't really snow, didn't we?)

Ouch!

I forgot to mention I shot myself in the finger yesterday with a nail gun. Fortunately it wasn't loaded but it still hurt. A lot. And it still does.

I just breezed past here and noticed I have been delinquent. And then I was hit with a little deja vu. Last year about this same time the blog was idle for a few weeks. School was keeping me busy then as well. Only about ten more days until I can stop using that excuse for a few weeks.

What's Up in the Shop?

After getting the laundry done, I headed out to the shop the create some more dust. After a couple of hours I had managed to make some new cabinets. I built the case and face frame today. Still need to putty, paint, and hang the doors. That probably won't happen for a week or so.

One can never have too much storage space and cutting up some wood creates more free space.