Recently we’ve had tons of stuff break! It all started the day before Luke was born.

1. The arcade monitor broke. I had it connected to a “smart” powerstrip that would only turn things on when the computer was turned on. However one day it got dumb and decided to turn the arcade monitor on and off continuously for hours. The result was a broken arcade monitor. Only took two months to get it repaired!
2. Stacie took the new car to a doctors appointment, and someone decided to scrape their car against the rear-left wheel. Had to take it to the body shop, and a week and a half later had it back.
3. The hard drive in the HTPC died, so I had to get a replacement drive and then reinstall everything. Luckily this time I used Norton Ghost to create an image of the drive. Now if anything like this happens, getting it set back up should be easy.
4. I noticed my quad core cpu was running a bit hotter than it should be, so I decided to try and re-seat the heatsink. In the process I broke the clips that hold it down, so then I had to order a new one. Luckily after putting on the new  fan/heatsink the processor runs a good 20 degrees Celsius cooler.

But now everything is fixed and working again. Stacie just reminded me that one of the lights in the kitchen isn’t working, but I need a new ballast to make that work. After that I think everything will be working again.

The Blarg’s hosting service crashed sometime last night and was down about 12 hours. The hosting service went to a backup from the 21st, so my last post was lost.

The htpc is back up and running with the replacement hard drive. It’s getting a super clean reinstall of Windows and I just installed Norton Ghost to make a nice backup in case this ever happens again. I’ve gone to great lengths to set things up, so once I have a backup of the whole thing, I won’t have to go through all the hassle of setup (which really wasn’t that bad a second time around). I bought a neat little cooler that attaches to the bottom of the hard drive and helps to pull some hot air off of it. In my case the hard drive is sort of isolated and no air passes over it, so this is a really easy and quiet way to circulate the air. I’ve even seen a five degree drop in my video card temps.

I started to play Final Fantasy 7 from the original playstation the other night. I remember when Andrew and I got that game back in the 90′s. I think he beat it, but I never did, so I figure why not throw it in and see what I can do. It’s an easy game to play when the baby is lying on your chest. I know the game takes a long time to beat, and I’ve got plenty of other things to do, so we’ll see how long my interest lasts.

Baby is doing well. He’s sleeping longer chunks at night, and already he’s able to spend a lot of that time alone in his bassinet. Hopefully sometime in the next couple months we’ll get him moved to his own crib and a good nighttime routine will be established. Our friend Shannon who lives in Georgia was out here on vacation and stopped by today to see Luke. It’s amazing to see the little changes he’s going through already. You can tell his eyes are working better because he looks around. Stacie walked by him in his chair today and his eyes about rolled out of their sockets as he watched her go by. He does a little bit of smiling, but not a ton yet. I can’t wait until I can tickle him or give him a raspberry and he squeals in delight. Right now when I do it he just looks at me like “what the heck is that!”

The Dodgers beat the D’backs. Woot woot!

For whatever reason we have Monday off, so hallelujah for that.

The hard drive in my HTPC died tonight. It was during the Dodger game, and I’m sure the death of the hard drive and the Dodger loss were related. For all the geeks, it froze, I rebooted, and could never get into windows again. Chkdsk kept freezing (a good 12 times) trying to startup, and even gave me an “unknown error has occured.” Tried to repair vista, but when it tried it said it can’t (because of a bad disk). I took the drive out and put it in my external usb drive on the upstairs computer, and even that is terrible. It showed me the contents of the HTPC drive for a minute, but then I started to get all kinds of errors trying to access it. Not sure why it went down, but I think it could be because of heat, so I’ll take a few steps to deal with that. It could be a completely random thing too, so who knows. Luckily it’s still under warranty, so the new one should be here soon. Only sucky part is I have to set it back up. I never got around to making a norton ghost image of it for precisely this situation. Oh well.

Baby is crying. I go.