Nerdy Story Below...

One of the hard drives in sexybeast bit the dust today, sexybeast being the newest of my computers. Unfortunately or fortunately depending on what light you look at it in it was the hard drive with the Windows XP operating system on it so that computer will be unusuable for the next two days. The ufortunate light is obviously that I'm out the money on that hard drive. The fortunate part is that anything I will need is backed up on the other drive or on my new FTP backup system (good timing). Another part of the fortunate side is that Windows XP wasn't behaving very well and it could have used a reformatting, I also can now easily install Linux and dual-boot that with Windows.
The hard drive died very fast, all the sudden it was making a clicking noise. I moved the computer a little to make room for my head to listen (nothing I haven't done before) and bam the computer turned off. After turning the computer back on and realizing the noise was about four times louder I was able to identify it from my C: partitioned drive. However, the computer would only give me disk errors from there on or just hang at the Windows boot-up screen.
Oh well the money part of it isn't any good, however I am upgrading from a 120 gigabyte hard drive with a 2mb cache to a brand new 160 gigabyte hard drive with an 8 megabyte cache, which shall provide a good speed and size increase. Sexybeast will now have 280 gigabytes inside of her, which will be very nice. As always anyone interested in their own hard drive upgrades can check out Slickdeals. On the very positive note my laptop will get some good use in the next two days with me not being able to use my nice desktop, which means I'll probably spend a whole lot of time cleaning up the laptop.

It seems as if the Christmas music is now taking over, its' that time of year again. Unfortunately I'm one of those "jerks" who isn't a big fan of the Christmas music. For this I'll be tortured for the next month being forced to listen to Christmas music and watch those lackluster Christmas movies. What's the point in being cold anyway?

Odd to consider what a crazy day the day after Thanksgiving is. Who chose this day to be the biggest shopping day of the year? More importantly, what moron decided it would start at 6 A.M.? It's as if someone felt we didn't like to sleep. With all of my ranting in mind and all the great computer deals at Best Buy, I was unable to force myself to get up that early. It just wasn't worth it, I enjoy my Internet shopping much more. I think this stems from a prior issue though, I despise the cold weather. If this day were to fall in the middle of August I'm sure I wouldn't mind being up that early to scoop up a great deal on a hard drive or monitor, however it's in November. Poor planning on someone's part leads to the lack of getting my business, however it doesn't look like they're hurting too bad because of that. Considering all of that Thanksgiving was good stuff, lots of food to eat. It's time to go back to cleaning out the files on my hard drive.

Want to see what the Internet looks like on a map? Here you go. I encourage that you read further into the site as it does have a pretty easy explanation of what's going on.

Happy Thanksgiving or something of that I'm too lazy to post something intelligent nature. Make sure you're playing lots of baseball this thanksgiving.

I'm the proud new owner of a great computer game. That's right, Railroad Tycoon 3. After waiting many moons for Railroad Tycoon 2 to come out it was great to see the third in the series come out in a little more timely fashion. Borrowing from what made the second game great, the third game has lived up to all my greatest dreams and more.

Out of guilty pleasure I've launched Geeks dot BobtheKing dot Com and Penguin Power. Both are in their infancy, but feel free to check them out.

A new game is available to play, hosted right here at BtK. Let's play some baseball. Swing for the fences.

It's time for you to play with a 4D Rubics Cube. I've found it to be impossible to beat so far but that's because I've never been very good at these things. Good luck!

Live from Janesville it's Network of Gamers LAN party live.

Ok, so that wasn't quite like Saturday Night Live, but oh well.

So yeah, Xbox mod project was an interesting experience. I plan to publish a guide of what to do and what not to do once I'm done. For now Burrow and I are taking a break while we wait to get a part back in the mail. While you sit at the edge of your seat waiting I have a short little story from Wired News entitled "Feel Free To Jack Into My iPod", it's about sharing your iPod music with another person that you meet on the street.

How To Lose a Geek in Ten Seconds. A comic from The Joy of Tech that is true to the bone.

It's a good time for a little sadistical humor. Enjoy

I have passed the 600 download mark on Stock.Xchng. You've saying who cares, but to me it's a pretty big thing, as all photos have to be approved by the administrator. It's good to see I'm doing something right.

Feel free to browse my gallery at the site. If you're into photography at all I definitely think you should sign up, this site is many times better than DeviantART ever was.

I didn't think it would ever happen, but it did today. I thought it was a joke that would only happen in Dilbert, but boy was I wrong. You all know what I'm talking about by now. Yes the dreaded I sent you a fax to let you know I left you a voice mail, which says I I left a message on your desk, that I sent an email.

Well the chain didn't quite work quite like that for me, but it was darn near close. I came to work today and had a message from company X, company X had had two seperate people leave me messages asking to call them back. Upon calling the long distance number back I find that all they wanted to say is that they sent me an email. The email which I had already read said they had sent the bins I had requested. Once again, I thought it was only a joke that things like this happened. A phone call telling me I had an email that said something was shipped, brilliant.

Straight off of MiniClip I bring you Slackers, collect hot dogs and win big.

I went up to meet a few friends and watch Wisconsin play Minnesota in hockey at the Kohl Center last night. Getting up to Madison was the toughest part of the night. I had to come to a complete stop on the interestate, twice and 12-18 into Madison was crawling like a sloth because of congestion. Before the game I had Ian's pizza, of the chicken and pepperoni variety (Ian's is known for their Mac and Cheese pizza). Being lucky enough to go with students of the school I was able to get one of the free t-shirts they gave away, however Paul managed to claim three at the end of the night. A rivalary like Minnesota vs Wisconsin was not to be played down, as their was a penalty 41 seconds into the game. Eric Schmoldt brings another solid review of the game. After the game it was off to Paul's dorm room where we sat in awe of how you could spend $142,000 on a set of computer monitors. Quite needless to say, but I want it.

MyTunes is now available, a compliment to the iTunes service from Apple. MyTunes allows you to download the music someone is sharing over a network, instead of just being able to stream it. A highly useful feature if you want to put songs on your laptop when you'll be away from home.

Steven Jacowski saves the day with these great banner ads.

It's been a rather slow day. How about for a chance, you post a link in the "comments" section to share what exciting things you have for everyone.

Who wants to bring me some caffeine?

UW-Madison appears to be the place to go to school, especially when you can be like Paul Ellison and piece together a picture of your dorm room in your free time.

There is another Network of Gamers LAN party on the 22nd of November, that's two saturdays from now. You should plan on coming if you're into games and in the Janesville area, it'll be a great time. As usual, hit the website for more details.

Slashdot brought to my attention a story about the 20th Anniversary of computer viruses being today. Good to see we can celebrate something so annoying.

I got back from Madison this afternoon. I'm pretty tired. Lots of lifting today, no fun. All in all it was a good time. I'm sure I'll babble about it another time. Have a wonderful Monday everyone.

I'm heading out of town for the weekend. There will be people here so please don't try and loot my house. I'll return to entertaining (or boring) you on Sunday evening. See you on the flip side

We'll make it up to you in the year 2000.

What's up with the war in Iraq? We seem to be a doing great job over there, as we now have more deaths after the war than during the war. It's going to cost us hundreds of billions of dollars and yet we have no chemical weapon finding. To top it all off today it was mentioned that the Iraqi government may have tried to reach peace with the United States before the war. However the United States apparently denied the request to meet. Interesting. At this point in time I can only call the war in Iraq a failure.

I don't want to hear any you're a jerk, anti-patriot rants either. I fully support the solidiers there and it's sad that they have to lose their lives over something that the people of Iraq don't even seem to want.

Thanks to Sean Dulin for pointing out my spelling error.

Geoff spent a lot of time working on this and he wants you to read it. Do him proud.

The Badger Herald Online brings us an article about "Feeding the Away-Message Addiction", if you've ever checked the away message of someone online you should read this.

The free magazines via SlickDeals are really starting to pour in now. Today I recieved my first issue of GamePro and I'm already a few weeks into InfoWorld and Barrons. All completely for free. Burrow gets a few different magazines then I get too such as Computer Gaming World. I suggest you sign-up to any freebies they offer and cash in.

Want to turn your head into a speaker? How about just turning the table your computer is on into a speaker? Sound interesting. I thought so. Read on about an Iowa company that is doing just that.

It's Sunday already wow. The German Exchange students leave today to return to Germany. It has been a good time while they were here.

Experiencing some new music today curtosy of the library I would like to recommend Juliana Theory, Bela Fleck & The Flecktones, Charlie Hunter, and The Ventures. My reasoing behind my selection from the library revolves primarily around how pretty the CD cover is or how clever the band name is. Amazingly the reasoning has never lead me to get a CD I hate, which is pretty amazing since I'm highly opinionated.

The movie "Identity" is pretty interesting. I don't think I would recommend it, but it kept my attention for a while. It leaves you thinking at the end, trying to put the pieces together. A movie I can recommend however is "The Rescusers Down Under", yes that's a Disney classic. Go watch that before you watch Identity.

It's 4 A.M. and I've just configured Apache on one of my servers in my basement. Tomorrow I shall work on the "secret" website Apache will be serving up for me, feel free to speculate. Eventually the ZireShot Gallery and Vivi's website will also be hosted on Apache. Why is Apache so cool you ask? It's open-source, that means free and community developed. It's not plagued with security holes like Microsoft's IIS.

If you're noticing the open-source trend here good job. That's the idea, open-source is simply a better solution. Initially it may seem a challenge but a migration to open-source software should always leave you ahead in the long run. I plan to have the servers running nothing but Linux in a couple of months, a much better solution than Windows for so many reasons. A few of those being better stability, an almost completely virus-free platform, and it's free.

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I had quite the experience tonight. Well at Meredith's house tonight we realized we needed a movie to watch. Chris Horton and I volunteered to go get one, Alison and Chantal decided to come with. We needed to bring back a scary movie to watch that wasn't rated R. Didn't seem that tough going into it. We got to Premiere Video and they didn't have the movie we picked out. So we conitnued searching. It turns out that every movie made this year that isn't about a 12 year-old girl is rated R. 45 minutes later we returned to Meredith's, without a movie. There is a few things to be learned, 1. Don't send Chris and I to get a movie, 2. Movies have gone way downhill since we were kids, 3. People that can't watch R rated movies make things tough real fast.

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