Since I'm up late, I'm the first to get to wish Mark a Happy Birthday!  Too late to crop this picture, though.

I took the time to upgrade to the latest version of dasBlog 1.7.  Things went quite smoothly.  Some of the directions needed to be read several times to make sense, but everything worked on the first try.  Something new in the comments is the "capcha" image that makes sure that an actual person is commenting.  If this is annoying, tell me, and I'll turn it off.  I'm also excited about the new Publish option, which will allow me to put in entries just for myself, for historical purposes.  Ooh, and it looks like we've got FreeTextBox 3.0 for entries now!

Ben noted that I didn't mention what kind of computer I got.  I did link to it in my first post, but very subtly.  Here's a link to what I bought, at Best Buy where I bought it.  The reason I'm not mentioning what computer I bought is as a reaction to how horrible their customer service was for Clinton as he attempted to buy his computer.  He eventually went to Best Buy and bought the same one I did.  The computer itself is great, and I'm very excited to make full use of it, including the Windows Media Center, but I'm not going to hook it up until we move into our new place.  New move-in date, by the way, is April 12th!

I had to use my computer too much in the first day or so to actually pay much attention to it.  Plus, I was occasionally still having to RDP to my old slow computer, and I was still having to do a lot of waiting.  During that time, I had planned to move my old good hard drive over to my new machine, but when I opened it up, I realized that it was a different kind of hard drive interface.  At least I was able to take advantage of that time to teach Clinton a little bit about the inside of a computer.  I was very impressed with the inside of the computer.  The case is a snap to open, requiring no screwdrivers.  There is a massive, wind-tunnel sized fan that helps keep everything cool.  It looks like it is expecting more hard drives, as access to the power connectors, SATA ports, and drive bays is front-and-center.  Once I finally got my old computer turned off, I also noticed something else...nothing.  My new computer is incredibly quiet, which almost makes working seem peaceful.

Now that I've actually gotten to play around on my computer, I'm really enjoying the speed.  Visual Studio projects open up so much faster.  Also, switching back and forth between HTML and Design view is immediate now; it took way too long on my old machine.  I originally set up the computer with the supplied keyboard.  The feature of being able to open and close my cd drives from buttons on my keyboard was almost enough for me to not switch back to my wireless keyboard...almost.  I figure there's got to be some way to set that up via software.  Anybody know a keyboard shortcut for ejecting a cd?

Setting up my printer was quite simple, as this computer wants to use USB ports.  My old computer wasn't as USB friendly.  Once installed, I shared it and then went over to Jamie's computer, fully expecting to have to install it on her machine as well.  Somehow, as if by magic, when I opened up the Printers folder on her computer, before I could even do anything, the printer attached to my computer appeared before my very eyes, well, in icon-form.  No setup necessary.  Also, and this could be my fault for screwing with permissions, now Jamie can open up our Quicken data file over the network without facing a Windows logon prompt.  Which is great, because now she doesn't need me to relink stuff after her computer is rebooted.

Well, the good news is that I got a new computer.  Starting a couple months ago, I had noticed that there were some strange glitches with certain non-essential files on my hard drive.  It was annoying, so I started moving all of my non-system and non-program files on to my other hard drive.  This seemed to make the problem go away.  But then, last week, I noticed that the computer was getting slower and slower, and I knew it was just a matter of time before the thing blew out.  However, I was just going to wait it out, because I had planned to get a new computer after we moved int our new place in March.  But then that got postponed, and it got to where it took me an hour to do 5 minutes worth of work.  So, Tuesday night at 8:30 I headed to Best Buy to buy me a new computer.  Fortunately, I'd been doing a lot of research on this while helping Clinton look for his new computer.  And fortunately, Best Buy had the computer in stock.  Unfortunately, the number of people asking questions heavily outnumbered those who were there to answer them.  So, it took me 45 minutes to point to the computer I wanted, for them to pull it down off the high shelf right next to me, and to finally check out.

The next day, I had a client meeting in Vista (two hours away), and my computer needed to be up and running with all of my files and programs loaded.  So, I set to to work setting everything up, and finished the essential stuff by 6:00 a.m.  After a quick hour nap, I was up and out the door, and Clinton took me to Enterprise for me to pick up a car.  (Jamie's been working on a project down on Rodeo Drive all week.)  Here's something that I hadn't realized: Rain means no cars at rental car places.  Apparently, the cars that people have been renting, they have been wrecking, so the rental cars are in the shop.  Plus, people have been wrecking their own cars in the rain, so they need to rent one.  Anyway, I had to wait 45 minutes or so for a car, but I was really too tired to care much, and getting upset wouldn't get me a car any faster.  I made the drive, had the meeting, then drove back, except that the drive back took 4 hours because of traffic.  Boy, I slept well that night.

I spent all day Thursday copying over the rest of my files, then stayed up late again Thursday night, cleaning and reorganizing my desk and the area around it, that some might call an 'office'.  My old computer is now turned off, but has power and network attachments, in case I need to power it up and retrieve some file I forgot.  Once we move, it is destined to become a test server.  I'll blog again with my first impressions of my new computer.

For those who don't follow it, California has gotten more rain in the past two weeks than in the history of California combined.  As a result, we got a call today saying that construction has been delayed on our new place.  No new date has been set yet.  Blast!

Jamie and I spent about a week and a half down in Fallbrook over the holidays.  We did Christmas at the Siebers, Grandma Sieber's birthday the next day at the Wonders, and New Year's Eve at Thornton Winery.  I got a mixture of gift certificates and clothes, most of which were specially requested from Banana Republic.  In fact, here's a pic of us at New Year's, with me in some of said clothes.

For those of you who didn't get a Christmas card from us this year, or got one late, that's because Jamie was busy working on American Black Beauty, and I'm a Christmas card slacker.  I did eventually go out and find some that I really liked.  They were my second choice, but my first choice was ridiculously expensive.  Today, Jamie and I were doing some shopping at the Beverly Center, and we came across my first choice with the price slashed 75% off.  So, our Christmas cards are already purchased this year.  Expect to get them early!

What? It was two weeks ago?