My wife & I had a very nice, relaxing family get-together last night. Food was handled pot-luck, my parents hosted, and everybody just kind of milled around and chatted. It was incredibly nice. I can't think of a better way to have vented some of the stress work has recently thrown at me.

Work has been a bit stressful lately. Without going into things I probably shouldn't discuss publicly, we're very close on something important and aren't sure if we'll make it or not. This causes great and surpassing stress. Ugh. Man, I hope this economy turns around soon. There's no problem in business that more business can't solve.

It's cold. It's so cold, that other cold looks at the cold we've got and goes "geez, man, back off a little." Like -14 degrees ambient cold. I'm usually fine with the winter, but this is just excessive.

So I got the new PC working (turns out the problem was the IDE/SATA bridge; once I bought a SATA hard drive the problems went away and windows installed just fine).

Running games on this new machine is PRETTY. Fallout 3 ran in low res on my old machine and cut scenes were chopped up (a section of the video stopped after just a few frames and stayed frozen). Now it goes straight to high-quality graphics and run as smooth as glass. Very nice. I'm looking forward to seeing what sorts of performance I get out of my other games.

So I got the new computer assembled. Here's what went into it, for the interested:

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=1901962&CatId=32
http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/searchtools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=3740794&csid=_21
http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=3672390&CatId=2320
http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=2206874&CatId=108
http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=4040218&CatId=3669

and one of these nifty little contraptions to convert an IDE hard drive to SATA, which the motherboard apparently likes MUCH better than IDE:

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=3728298&CatId=1455

I wound up just buying everything from Tiger Direct; even though it took more than one trip (the old memory I had wouldn't fit the new motherboard) it was both faster and cheaper than buying the same stuff from newegg. Sales tax in Naperville is only 6.75%, and shipping for Newegg worked out to a quite a bit higher percentage than that. I already had the media drive, hard drive, and peripherals, so I just used what I had. The OS is going to be Windows XP home, but unfortunately the CD I got was defective, so I either need to find someone who has a windows XP CD so I can install it or wait until Monday and drive BACK to Naperville so TigerDirect's tech people can help me out. Thankfully, XP CDs are interchangeable; all I need to activate the license is the product key on the packaging and THAT'S not defective. Still a bummer not to be able to use the new computer tonight, though. I was really looking forward to seeing what Fallout 3 looks like with the new hardware.

I'll fully admit that the case is the worst part of the new rig, but it's still fine for my purposes. I may upgrade to something nicer like this: http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=2337812&CatId=32 at some point in the future, but for now, what I've got will work okay, I think. It's not a Falcon Northwest or Alienware, but it's a lot better than the IBM workstation I was forcing to run games (largely against its will, I suspect, poor thing) and the really important stuff (CPU, GPU, Mobo and memory) are all at least decent quality.

A final, unexpected benefit of this project: this was FUN. I enjoyed the experience of shopping for parts and building the new computer with my own hands quite a bit. This will definitely not be the last time I do this.

Special thanks to my wife for letting me pull the money from savings for this, my grandpa for giving me the original computer I stripped for drives and peripherals, and to my dad who lent me his technical know-how at several points along the way.

So my wife and I talked it over, and instead of trying to find restore discs that I may or may not even have and/or trying to get virtumonde off the computer, I'm leaning towards stripping it for parts (Hard drive, DVD burner, memory, power supply, peripherals) and taking another $500 to buy a case, motherboard, video card, CPU, and windows XP license (probably from newegg, I imagine, though I may buy some of the parts from tiger direct so I don't have to pay shipping; the case in particular is at the top of this second list) and building a new, better desktop PC, more suited to gaming than the current one.

Man, I wish I had two things:

1. The restore discs for this hand-me-down desktop I own. I really, really wish I could just grab my important files and start from scratch with the damned thing.

2. The cretin who wrote virtumonde handcuffed to a chair.

I try running Avast, and the computer does an unstoppable shutdown partway into the scan. I still haven't gotten any response from the safe networking forums. At least I don't think the problem can get any worse; I took the computer offline (as in, physically unplugged it) as soon as I figured out it was infected.

I had to switch my firewall off to reconfigure my modem after a power outage Friday night. I forgot to switch it back on, looked up some song lyrics, and now my desktop is a free-range malware farm. Because the computer's a hand-me-down, I don't have system restore discs for it, which means I'm waiting in line at Safer Networking to get some help from one of their security experts. Arrgh. I've reset all my important passwords and even switched around the designated email address for a couple of things in case some of the crap on my desktop sent a bunch of data to some nefarious person, but now I'm reduced to using my laptop for everything until I get some help. What a pain. I really wish I had the restore discs; I'd just peel the important files off of it and reset it to factory defaults (I have no problem at all just "nuking" an infected computer), but, alas, 'tis not to be.

After a very intense Monday-Wednesday this week, I got a paid day off for New Year's day. My wife & I spent the day sitting on the couch, watching season 6 of The Shield straight through. Now I really want season 7 on DVD so I can find out what happens. Sadly, it doesn't even have a release date yet.

I also had to leave an enormous mess at work due to a heavy shipment and time constraints, which I'm sure isn't going to spin back positively on me in the spring when my review comes around. I singlehandedly got through a huge pile of backlist boxes, but didn't have time to sort them onto carts. My boss gave the "open, stack, and leave" tactic her approval, but I still left work undone. I've also gone over on hours this week, which similarly can't look good. I obviously need to crank it up another notch, but for the life of me, I can't see how. It's disconcerting to think that in order to do my job truly well, I might need real, actual superpowers.

Of course, my wife and probably many of my coworkers would read this and roll their eyes. I suppose this is what happens when a person with a strong work ethic, a disposition towards being suspicious, uncompromising, and a little paranoid, and who expects to be cut no slack gets in a jam at work. Blah.

I did the bookstore hell a while ago. Almost 3 years, in fact. I have since moved up in the world. Here's what bookstore hell looks like from my new perspective: