Updates

Last week (and this weekend) was pretty light on updates, so I figured I’d add a quick post making some excuses telling everyone what I’ve been up to.

First of all, the NHL season started last week, so obsessively putting together a fantasy hockey team took up most of my free time a couple of days before opening night. Although I’m still pissed off at the couple of trades I had to waste to get rid of some dead weight players who aren’t playing or didn’t make the cut, I’m doing relatively well, fourth place in my division as of this morning. That’ll have to change… 🙂

Secondly, I finally broke down and bought a new computer, after holding out with my Pentium 3 800 Mhz for a couple of years now. As usual, some new games were a large motivating force behind this decision; whenever I look at the minimum hardware requirements on a game box and I’m not up to snuff, I know it’s getting to be that time, although I don’t play half as many games as I used to. Still, now I can play some of the new games I’ve been eying for a while now (Enter The Matrix; Tron 2.0; the Civilization III Conquests Expansion Pack when it comes out; and maybe NHL 2004, although NHL 2003 was a big disappointment compared to earlier versions) without worrying about things being horribly slow and unstable.

Besides games, I’ve been doing a lot more digital photography and music work on the computer, and HAL5 was just getting too bogged down and unstable at times. So HAL6 arrived last Thursday, and I’ve been working on him off and on the whole weekend. As you might have guessed from the name, this is the sixth major computer upgrade I’ve handled on my own, although this time I broke down and bought a ready-made system, one of the few I haven’t built on my own. Still, I must say that I’m very happy with the Alienware Area-51 system I customized. The hardware is top-notch, the software installed was well-appointed and completely bloat-free, and the assembly and installation of everything was the most professional I’ve ever seen. I still sort of miss putting together the system myself, but after the month-long nightmare of troubleshooting I experienced last time around, I am much happier leaving the installation and assembly to the professionals.

Rest assured, however, that HAL5 will continue to serve us well. The plan right now is to make him into a second workstation with lighter duties, but more importantly to act as a dedicated music server for all of our MP3s. A nice big hard drive and an upgrade to Windows 2000 (rather than 98SE) should allow us to store our entire music collection on HAL5 as MP3s, and my AudioTron already does a great job of streaming them to my stereo system on demand. Sweet… 🙂

Finally, here in southern Maryland, we had a great holiday weekend, with beautiful fall weather pretty much the entire time. Between family stuff up in Baltimore and yardwork around the house, we were kept pretty busy, although we were still able to enjoy our long weekend. Now it’s time to get back into the swing of things, although it’s taking me a little time this morning to wake up and get moving. I hope everyone enjoyed their weekend and has a good week. Hopefully I’ll have more time to update this week…

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