Yup, I finally got a chance to use the lawn mower I bought last week. It apparently doesn’t have rear wheel drive, so I’ve decided that feature is for pussies and lesser wusses. Yeah, that’s it. Not that my shoulders hurt and my hand is all blistered. Well, at least it looks decent. And the boxes are out of the main room, mostly. There are still some book piles but you know how that goes, its the work of less than this afternoon and they are all cleared out. Just three more boxes in the master bedroom and the silly huge pile of posters and other bits of art ephemera that one accrues over a few years. Still need to get another bookcase to make up for lost furniture. Well, that’s what trips to target are for.

The furniture tech from Rooms to Go came by yesterday and took a look at the scratched coffee table and the gouged sofa and told me what to do about it. The table was pretty easily fixed, but the sofa will need to be replaced as it was actually chipped and is missing a thumbnail sized chunk of one of the facing bits of wood.

I also managed to de-caulk and re-caulk the master bathroom tub so that’s usable again. Kristi swung in and took care of the third coat of paint, so the walls are looking good. Just need to hang the over-the-toilet medicine cabinet and we are in bidness. Firefox is unacquainted with the word bidness. I shall have to teach it. I scratched the hell out of the tub, so I need to find some kind of tub bond-o that can clean it up and make it a presentable tub though, but that’s what trips to Lowe’s are for.

That leaves only the upstairs bathroom (with its ocean motif) and the upstairs blue room as project rooms that still want for completion. I mean a few scattered decor things are left too, like rugs and curtains, but the house is almost in a “hey, I don’t have to think about painting anything” mode. And that’s a good thing.

So let me know when people are available, because I’d love to have people over to check this place out. I’m rather proud of it.

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Still unable to play WoW. Man I miss that game. The worst part is Blulicity was just about to hit Darkshire, and that place is Paladin Candy.

Speaking of Paladin Candy, Kotaku has a big gallery of their Warrior-Priests. Man. Dual hammers? An off-hand book? Yikes those dudes are butch. So…. open beta? In other MMO news, we’ve got that perennial favorite, Antiques Roadshow Online. Man I love the part of that show where the suit tells the dude with the fanny pack that his blender is actually worth $30,000 and the fanny pack dude’s eyes light up and the suit has to say, “No, not $30,000 to ME, you’ll still have to find a buyer.”

And while we’re talking about $30,000, how much do you think they’d charge for this watch? Man that thing is swank. And just about as confusing as my current watch. This thing has gotten me about as many comments as the one where the second hand is the numbers on the watch. Its difficult to explain but its somewhat trippy.

Man, 210 needs to get over that chemo and get his ass back to work. I need to talk to somebody about comics and Dragon magazine, but Kristi’s eyes keep glazing over. I could always repair my bridges with Jason, but… well that’s personal. So that’s that. What I would like to discuss is the Supergirl costume redesign contest that recently concluded at Project: Rooftop. Personally I think the Punk Supergirl is hot to death. Of course she would probably kick my ass, but what are you going to do, she’s the Girl of Steel. Stuff like that makes me think back to the Elseworlds comics I probably lost when my hard drive went supernova. Man that’s annoying. I liked “Doom that Came to Gotham.” The ending was a bit annoying, but who would emerge unscathed from what happened at the conclusion? Somebody who wasn’t human, that’s who. On the subject of art, here are some great Alex Toth model sheets I found off a link from boingboing.

Stock pictures galore over at Swaptorium. This is apparently a Loyal Order of the Moose “Haven of Contentment.” Man that feels creepy just typing it. I swear, if I had to make CD covers, that “Protect Us” decal is right up there with the SHELL station with the S broken out that Martin used to have on a webpage that is now something like ten years gone. Sadly, I don’t think the internet Wayback machine could help us there.

Ah well, more later. I’d like to talk about D&D and such. And I still need to tell you about the Worst Deadmines Group Ever.

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Just in case anybody who reads this page (Hi Mom) wants to put YouTube videos on their WordPress blog, here’s the tip. Turn off the rich visual editor. You’ve got to do it in Options > Writing and then in Users (Saving each time) but as soon as you’ve turned off the Rich Editor, it shouldn’t turn the Embed objects you get from YouTube into a big blank space.

Oh, and Firefox dictionary? Maybe you should learn a few words. Like Firefox and YouTube.

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So, anybody else hear about how Windows NT4.0 won’t be updating to Daylight Savings Time this year? Anybody care?

Wait. I care. Because I have to admin seventy WinNT4.0 boxes here at work. And one of them is a CMS server. Sigh. Ah well, there’s a patch. Sadly it can’t be run at startup for some reason (probably a rights issue. We’ve got regular users locked down pretty tight here), so like last week I’ve got quite a bit of foot traffic looming in the next few days. Ah well, that’s why they pay me the big bucks.

Still have no WoW box. The fiancee informs me that annexing her laptop and installing WoW is “exclusionary” and would not be allowed to stand. Ah well, back to the task of selling blood to finance a new motherboard. Type O Neg is pretty highly regarded, I seem to remember. Hopefully I can make it pretty fast because I think plasma goes for $40 a shot. Ten times and I’ve got that PC.

In the meantime I’ve got more than a little to keep me interested. See, the foot traffic I mentioned from last week was the outbreak of an annoying virus in the call center. The Windows 2000 boxes seem relatively immune to it, but the WinNT4.0 boxes die the death of a thousand years. These being at best 400mhz celerons, fixing them is a chore. The process involves installing Symantec AV corporate 9.0 (previous version was 4.0), erasing old profile directories, setting new permissions to the Default User directory, then running a regedit to remove whatever the virus was calling itself on any given day (it showed as Rinvs.exe, Navscnr.exe, Eclipse.exe, and Netbeans.exe) then rebooting very quickly with the power button before it could put itself back in the registry and then removing the files previously named from C:\WINNT\System32.

Fun stuff. Only took between 30 and 45 minutes. And people here are soooo understanding. You’d think being asked to go into the “No fault” unavailable status and move to a new desk would be welcomed. Sadly, no. I mean its like pulling teeth.

This little slice of heaven is Ether Vapor. I am installing that when I get home today. Hopefully the woefully inadequate 1.7ghz Pentium M in my laptop can keep up. I can’t read moonspeak so I’m not sure about the system reqs.

Well, I’m still unpacking boxes so I can make space for the new furniture we’re getting on Saturday; that should be enough to keep me busy 24/7 until next week.

Oh, Sandy, If you still read this blog could you put Cali and Blue on Shore Leave (or its nearest equivalent)? Seriously I think that this issue with the computer won’t be resolved until much later. Several months at least, so I won’t be seeing you guys in Azeroth anytime soon. Whenever those boxes are unpacked and the couch arrives (and we stain the entertainment center and move the TV out of the master bedroom) I think it may be time to have people over to check out the new place. You’ve got my cell. Keep in Touch and all that.

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Yeah, I’ve been busy as hell these last few weeks.  The fiancee and I have moved into the new house, mostly.  I still have a pile of computer parts at the old house and am slightly feeling like I should just toss ‘em.  Not doing anything with them anyway, and they won’t help to alleviate my current problem.

See, I blew up my computer.  It sucks hard.  I bought this new case, right?  And it moved the power supply from the top to the bottom of the case.  No prob, really.  Except it won’t connect to the motherboard now.  See, I love the Antec Nine Hundred (Great case) but I need an extension cable to connect my power supply.  The local quasi-enthusiast store was closed so I went to Best Buy.  I asked around and one of their Geek Squaddies handed me an extension cable that connects 24 pin ATX to 20 pin ATX power supplies.  I plugged this in and was immediately greeted with the smell of burning plastic.  I tried to tip the box back over and pull the supply, but I bumped the power button.  Fried the hard drive (grinding noise when plugged in) the motherboard (will not boot, gives obscure beep code related to Gate 80 not closing) and the power supply (will not switch off when switch is moved to the “0″ position).

So bad news.  And the parts that still work (Video card, processor and RAM) are of old hardware revisions that were on the chopping block.  The RAM is DDR1, the processor is single core and the Video Card is AGP.  So if I wanted to grab a new motherboard, the power supply and hard drive are easy to replace out of spares. I would want to get one with support for dual (or quad) core processors, DDR2 and PCI express.  None of my existing parts would do any good, except perhaps the RAM.  Sadly my motherboard (Intel d875pbz) is not on ebay often, and with it is, the damned thing goes for $100+.  I can get a BioStar mobo and video card bundle from Directron for $150, which is good.  With RAM and dual core processor the damage is about $400.  This is do-able in a few months.

Not now as I need to pay bills and buy a lawnmower.  You remember that old Tootsie roll commercial?  Well, whatever it is I think I see, becomes a scene from WoW to me.

Sigh.

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