LuxFX / They Think They’re Newsworthy

Today was Jen and my 5 year anniversary! Wow, five years! That’s just incredible!

We had a lovely day. We didn’t make any big plans, not complicated dinners out or anything. We ordered Chinese and had dinner at home with the family. We exchanged gifts and watched a movie with my Mom (who’s visiting - yay!), and just had a nice simple evening. It was just lovely! Jen gave me an amazing clock! It is just so perfectly ME I couldn’t believe it!

Ok, so the original plan was to go out and see The DaVinci Code tonight. But, well, everybody says it’s terrible! Which is sad…but I’m not going to waste a nice anniversary night watching a movie we won’t like.

For the birth of his beautiful new baby girl, Rhorie! She’s quite a cutie!

• And I thought I needed a nap…. This Vietnamese man hasn’t slept a wink in 33 years, after having a bad fever.
• Geeks make good fathers Here’s a top ten list for all you Geeks out there, and wives/husbands of Geeks!
• Cello multiplicity A video really beautiful Cello rhondo, with 37 Cello parts. All played by the same man!

Ok, so really they’re annoucing the upcoming of the anniversary of the death of Pope John Paul II. But he died on my birthday last year. So now everybody’s talking about my birthday. Hmmm, that’s kind of weird.

Otherwise, things are going just swimmingly here. If, by swimmingly, you mean drowning. I just have an unfathomable amount of work these days. I can’t even comprehend how much work that really is.

It’s a good thing I’m not completely obsessed with, say, a video game these days. (Although, if somebody wants to send me a copy of the PC version of Oblivion, I’ll have to play it to just say I did. And then maybe play it some more.)

• 500 Kv switch An impressive video of a 500 Kv switch being opened while under load.
• Real-Life Transformer The audio is in Japanese, but it’s the video that’s amazing. A real robot transforming from a car to a robot and back!
• Really big error When your error message is 10 feet tall, you know you’ve made a really big mistake.
• Quantum Double Slit animation A segment from the movie What the Bleep? that describes the wave+particle property of subatomic particles, using the famous double-slit experiment.

I’m taking four days off. Sat, Sun, Mon, Tue. I need to fix my exhaustion. Badly.

To sum up — I did about 110 hours last week (yes, at least one-hundred and ten, probably more had I been counting more accurately), and I need a break.

Vacation is good. I’m having lots of fun with Jen and the kids (they’re so damn cute)! I’m taking it easy, and getting sleep. Hooray for sleep!

For those wondering what hole I’ve fallen into, it’s called the Hole of Technological Chaos. In addition to the massive workload I’m trying to shoulder right now, my computer got zapped right in the middle of rebooting and killed the part of my hard drive that my operating system was on. The good news is that none of my project files were lost! (phew) The bad news is that I’ve had to get a new drive (and, finally, a battery backup UPS device), and reinstall everything, from the ground up.

I’ve spent about 50 hours in the last four days on restoring my system, and trying to get various projects done in the time between reinstalling bits of software and hardware. I hadn’t really appreciated how many applications I actually use!! This is really taking forever….

I’m trying to look at this in the most positive light possible. For instance, I’m very happy to be running on a clean OS install. My boot time is about 1/4 what it used to be, and I think there is some improvement on runtime. Another plus is finally having a UPS device. I won’t have to worry about this anymore! Finally, I’m in a better position with my hard drive. I’ve replaced an old ATA100 40GB hard drive with a S-ATA 320GB hard drive. 40 gigs to 320 gigs is one heck of a nice change. Plus since I’m on serial ATA instead of parallel ATA, the drive is a lot faster than normal.

As for my cartoons…. I don’t know if I will ever get caught up with those at this point. This might be the end of TTTN.