It's been such a long time...

I know, I'm sorry. It's been, what, 6 days? Wow. I've been, um, 'busy.' Now, I apologize for not accounting for every facet of the last 6 days of my life, but I shall mention a few noteworthy ones...

So, I did have a very merry Xmas, thanks for asking. I was surprised (happily) with the 'rents, they got both of the 'big ticket' items that I asked for: A PDA and an external HD. The one annoying thing about the HD is that it can run off a single 6-pin firewire port, but the PCMCIA firewire card that I got doesn't supply power on the firewire ports, so I have to run the HD off two USB ports to get the thing to run. Oh well, just technology being obnoxious, I guess. I also got the new U2 and the new Green Day. So far I've been quite pleasantly surprised by both CD's. The last CD I got that I really liked was the last Springsteen, and that was...two years ago?

Xmas eve was nicely spent hanging out with Dina wathcing TV at my house. Unfortunately, she's in Paris/London for most of the rest of the break.

Right, so the day after xmas was snowing, and that made me very happy upon awakening. Well, I was happy until I realized that I'd need to go out and scrape one lousy inch off the entire driveway.

So, I've been trying to wean Nick/Nate/'rents off my tech-support wise. Should've known better than to try it at holiday time. Both Nate and Nick had games that didn't work right/at all upon installation and the printer isn't working, I guess. Nick's problem still hasn't been resolved, but it did lead to getting a fresh soundcard for the 'new' computer downstairs. Happily, Nate's issue was almost entirely handled by Nate/mom. I had to yell at nate cuz he's too lazy to sign up so he can e-mail Ubisoft tech questions and also he was completely baffled when he had to be 13 to sign up for it or something....I just had my mom sign him up. Arg. For Nick's issue I screwed with sound drivers (likely not really the source of the problem, but anyway) for a few hours before the computer started arguing with itself and drivers from both Creative Labs and Dell gave me the electronic finger and declared that my computer wasn't cool enough for sound cards or their drivers. The problem was mostly rooted in the fact that it was a 'proprietary' Dell version of a soundblaster, so creative drivers can't run on it and the serial code on the card itself (I got so fed up that I opened up the case) didn't match the model that the computer said it had in it. I didn't dare call Dell support cuz I would have gotten stuck on the phone for 3 hours going through guys named 'bob' and 'joe' in India who've prolly never seen the inside of a computer before and still not have them fix my problem for me. No, seriously, that happened to me before. I was installing a second harddrive in the 'new' computer and I'd done it before so I hadn't realized you had to do something to it from the command prompt before, but they had to assume that I was proud that I remembered to plug in the computer for it to start. THis meant that they couldn't just tell me to type 'D:' at the command prompt to change to the new drive. Oh no, I had to change the jumpers on the new drive, disconnect the old drive, plug in the new one, reformat or whatever the new one when it was the only drive connected to the computer, and then change the jumpers back and re-connect both drives. This is all to stop me, an obviously stupid person, from typing 'D:' cuz obviously that could only end in disaster. It took me 3 hrs, 10 min, I was on my third tech support rep, and if I had no idea what I was supposed to be doing (as they assumed was the case) I would have still lacked a functioning harddrive because they said nothing about formatting from within windows so that it's NTFS or whatever protocol XP uses.

Right, so...had a good time hangin' with the AZN brothers, played sooo much XBox on Rishabs rediculously modded one. He has a 200GB HD in there and he has all his games burned to the drive and NES, SNES, and N64 emulators on there. We played Mariocart64 for a while, tried Mario Tennis, but that didn't like any of the emulators very much. We ended up playing the Guy Game practically all night. It's like mixing You Don't Know Jack with....Girls Gone Wild.

Well, I'm tired, I think I'll only play WoW for...45 min tonight. Then it's off to sleep.
G'night all!

PS I hope the swelling goes down soon, my paranoid schizo friend!

[EDIT (4:05 AM):] Alright, I played for more than 45 min, but just a little more. Now it's sleepy time