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I am right up there on the top of the idiot pole this evening. The work week finished well and I arrived at the house with a single task that needed to be accomplished before I could rest easy for the weekend: figure out how to stabilize my failing computer. I had cornered myself through procrastination into a system with insufficient hard drive space to accept more data, a tendency to not come back after a reboot without chicken bones, tea leaves, and smudge sticks, and no where to backup the data that was destine to be lost if when it crashed. I set out for Fry's with the intent of purchasing an external drive of the Firewire or USB2.0 flavor however, when I arrived I thought better of it since we've recently had a lot of instability. I started adding up pieces parts and calculating how much I could build a system for... one to get by... ugg. Even if I ordered the parts online to save tax, I'd still only be saving a hundred bucks or so, so I started shopping sales. I found a system that met all my requirements and was reasonably priced. Whew! Exhale. Not really. They were out of stock. I chose another similar... same specs but with less memory. Out of stock. I chose another with a slower processor and less memory. In stock, but all the memory (from every brand they carry) was out of stock. Fuck. What kind of sweat shop is this? So, all said and done, I got a 3.0GHz Pentium IV (with Hyperthreading), 512MB PC2700, 160GB HD, DVD+/-RW, DVD-ROM, Radeon 9200 (the 128MB model), and all the normal shit (10/100 NIC, modem, floppy, etc.) for less than a grand after the $100 mail in rebate. VISA loves me. Anyhoo, after my buddy Raymund losing the last 3 months of photos post hard drive crash and Tom losing 15GB of his photos from the last calendar year, I wasn't going to risk it when my system started flaking. So, the fun begins. I come home and pick up EL for some food and fun at Sam's. We stay until 10:30-ish and head home to check on Henry. I plug in the new system and observe not just a boot into Windows XP Home Edition, but a boot into a cluster fuck of all varieties of sample software already installed. Oh yeah, that's why I've built every system I've used for the last 5 years. I remember now. I have this grand idea to wipe it all clean and install a brand spanking fresh coat if XP Professional on the system. Yes, I know I preach about all the goodness of Linux here, but I use Photoshop CS more than seagulls shit on cars at the beach, so I must install the root of all evil. Anyhoo, I'm about to start the reformat and (luckily) I notice a proprietary system restore/archive program that allows you to backup your state information to DVD or CD. Oh what the hell... why not? I do it. XP Pro goes on like a champ... system reboots... and there it is. Half the shit on the mobo is unrecognized. The only "Ethernet" connection seen is the Firewire controller (yeah, go figure that out) and I'm dead in the water. P-H-U-C-K I take a few deep breaths and pull out the freshly burned recovery CD's and start reverting back to the original partition configuration and the preloaded marketechture. It's almost 3:00 and it's just now getting close to being done. Live and learn. On another note, I had a lot of time to think while waiting on whirring drives and calculating chips. I browsed around through some old photos... many from before I knew what I was doing. I picked some of my wonderful wife and did black and white conversions on them all... a little tribute to the woman I love more than anything on Earth. Goodnight.