So... my hard drives dead

Yep, it happens to all of us. The cool thing about this one is that it's just a bad sector, so it's a slow death. In times of my youth, I would try to keep this drive alive by "not writing on that sector." Now, thanks to countless hours scraping a B out of my Computer Architecture course (and what I should have picked up in my A+ cert back in '01) is that doing that is pretty much impossible. I was thinking of trying to partition the drive and 'catching' the bad sector in one of the partitions, thus isolating it. I might just do that for fun and see how long it lasts but... I don't want the safety of all my witty de-motivational pictures and unpopular music to rest in the clutches of a damaged drive. Oh well, as much as I loathe pouring money into their coffers, Best Buy has a great sale on a 320 GB Western Digital for $75.00. It's got 16 Mb of cache and it's 7200 rpm so it's all good.

Oh, did I tell you about the Acer? We wanted to get the kids a DVD player for the car and Hayden a protable video game system for trips. Instead of that we bought an Acer Aspire. It's this little laptop with a 10 ince screen. It has a 160 HDD and a 1.8 GHz processor with a GB of RAM... so it's definalty not a powerhouse by any means. What I did was crunch some movies down and put them on there as well as all the NES, SNES and SEGA games I had on there. Now it's a little media player with 2,000+ games and 100 movies. I think that beats a DS-lite any day. Hayden's stoked and I actually like having the thing around the house since it's got a built in wireless NIC.

The best part about it is having it in the car. We went to gymnastics last Saturday and since I had both the kids I took the laptop. Seri and Hayden got to watch Bolt on the way to the gym and Seri watched Cinderella (one of her favorites) while there. After we went to Sonic for grilled cheese sandwiches and I war-dialed into one of the 5 wide open networks I found and surfed around. I can't believe that it's 2009 and that still is so easy to do. Good stuff. I hopped onto their printer and printed off every page of the Onion as fast as I could... and then we went home. Yeah, I love this little laptop.

We'll be in NY in late June. Mom got a cottege off of Lake glow-in-the-dark so that will be fun. I don't have classes till June 1st so I'm going to try to convince Joy into letting me tear out our tree and replace it will a nice garden. I might even get all crazy and finish off the cubby under the stairs!!

Last but not least, congrats to Heather for becoming a M.D. That hat is completely ridiculous. I'm glad you got sorted into Hufflepuff. I totally expect some blank perscrition forms when I get up there!