I'm back at the office less than 8 hours after leaving last nigh/this morning.  My wife calls with an unusual request. 

She says: “I turned on the XBOX.  I have a picture but there's no noise.”

Me: “Did you try turning the volume knob on the speaker?”

She: “Do you think I'm an idiot?”

Me: “No.  Sorry.  I love you.”

At this point, I connected to my home pc using a remote desktop connection.  I unmuted the line-in connection and was immedately rewarded with the satisfying sounds of the Namco Museum theme music.  The best part is that my wife thinks that I performed some feat of magic that she was fortunate to witness but not quite understand.  Today is starting off in a good direction.

I've been fairly depressed lately.  The deck always seems to be stacked against me these days.  I probably should be having this conversation with a professional rather than those few subscribers who are probably waiting for me to shut up and talk about something technical already.  Anyway, I'm making an effort right here and now to turn things around.  I thought I would start with a list of things that give me joy.  If you don't care, stop reading now.

Things That Make Me Happy

• My Lovely Wife
• The fact that I will soon be moving into a brand new house
  • That I could afford
  • Without stretching too much
  • While still saving for retirement
  • Where my current neighbors will not be
  • And there will be room for a few new additions to the family
  • Only one of which will be a dog
  • Or a Mac mini
• Solving difficult technical problems
• Writing code
• Reading code
• Writing about code that I've either written or read
• Taking pictures
• The fact that Michael is moving on
  • Ok, so I'm happy for him, but damn it's going to suck to see him go
  • But at least he has an XBOX now, with a XBOX Live starter kit which he will hopefully use before it expires.
• Reading good books
  • Technical or otherwise
• Reading blogs
• Reading newsgroups
  • and participating more this year
• IM conversations
  • With people I only know through blogs
  • as well as people I see every day
• A really great bottle of wine
• Snow
• As long as I don't have to drive in it
• and the fact that I can still laugh about wrecking the rental car that January while in Minnesota
• Channel 9
• That I have no regrets about my failed attempt to get a job at Microsoft

That's it for now.  There's much more that makes me happy, but this process has encouraged me at least a little.  I'm going to run with it and see where it takes me.  I'll update my list as I notice things bringing me joy.

It's 9:30 PM on a Sunday, and I am at the office.  It's amazing what a few noisy neighbors and an apartment full on in-laws will make you do.

Brad Wilson has expanded his dotnetdevs site to include a new advice section.  His first entry is something that every developer should IMMEDIATELY read and internalize.

Day V

Installed drivers for Canon Pixma IP5000 printer from CD

Automatic print-head alignment

Replaced magenta and cyan cartridges

Shared printer and made sure other boxes on the network could print to it

Downloaded latest drivers for Epson Perfection 1660 PHOTO scanner

Installed LaserSoft Silverfast SE - Epson

Installed Nero 6

Installed Colorvision PhotoCAL + Spyder drivers

Reboot

Calibrated monitor

Downloaded and installed VMWare Workstation 5.0 Beta

Reboot

Activated windows

Installed Dantz Restrospect 6.5

Created backup schedule for Desktop.

Performed backup of desktop

Installed DVD backup software

Reboot

Done for now!

Day IV

Installed Anapod Explorer 8.7.0

Reboot

Downloaded and installed ipod updater

Reboot

Installed ipod drivers from CD

Somehow, the ipod got restored to factory condition.  Have to reload all 5000+ songs. This wouldn't be so bad if I didn't also need to downsample all the bitrates to that they all fit on my 20GB device.  Thanks apple.

Configured anapod explorer to do the transfer and downsampling.  Transferred a portion of my library, so I at least have something to listen to.  The remainder will have to be transferred later.  Crap.  It's not down sampling…

Installed InterVideo MP3 Xpack

Transferred a bunch of songs, using the AudioMorph function, which is now working correctly

Installed Diskeeper 9 Pro trial edition (I own 7 & 8).  I'm really interested to see if it has ANY improvements in handling the 2GB files that Vmware produces.  7 & 8 both completely consumed all the resources in the system while processing virtual disk drives.  I hope that DK8 has realized that it doesn't need to read an ENTIRE file into memory before attempting to defrag.  If so, I'll upgrade.

Installed Sequoia View

Installed ISO Buster

Installed IIS and FPSE

Reboot

Installed VS Prerequisites

Installed VS.NET 2003 Enterprise Architect

Installed Jan 05 MSDN Library

Reboot

I can no longer see the second partition on my main HD.  Installing EasyRecovery Professional to see what's up.

No errors are found, but there is no file system.  Recovered the virtual machines using EasyRecovery, so at least no data has been lost.

Day III

Installed MS Money 2005.  Tried to connect up my money file.  Money says that it needs to upgrade the file to the newest version.  I suspect that what REALLY is going on is that the file was created with a more recent build of Money than is on my DVD, and noone considered the use case that a user would want to repave their machine.  Now I'm going to try and create a dummy money file and let Money update itself before trying to open my real file.  That worked, but thanks for littering my desktop with icons for other services.  I should charge for the advertising.

Installed McAffe VirusScan from web subscription

Scanned for viruses since I have been running without a password on my account for over a day

Installed WinRAR 3.42

Installed Genuine Windows Validation control so that I can try the beta of the microsoft anti spyware app.

Crap I need to activate first.  Why have a 60 day grace period????

Going back to adaware.  Installed and scanned

Installed Adobe DNG Converter and Camera Raw 2.3 Plugin

Installed Firefox

Installed Googlebar extension

Installed IEView extension for the rare times I need IE

Installed trial version of PowerDVD 6 (I own version 4)

Installed software for mouse and keyboard

Reboot

Office 2003 Pro

Office 2003 SP1

Office updates from web

iTunes

Added files to iTunes library

Day II

Replaced monitor with 2001fp that surprisingly arrived early

Hooked up cable feed to wintv card and did autoscan of channels

Installed external DVD burner

Installed DVD backup software

Reboot

Activated windows since my 60 day MSDN grace period suddenly expired after 1 day

Installed Photoshop CS

Connected external HD that contains all data files

HD stops transferring to main HD.  Move around to different USB port.  Loose ability to see drive at all.  Crap.

Starting over again.  Really glad I wasted that activation earlier.

Formatting

Installing Windows XP RTM this time

Told windows messenger to never run

VIA Ethernet driver from CD

Reboot

Configured windows

Made sure I could see my external HD and copy files

Installed VIA USB 2.0 Driver from CD

Reboot

Copied files again, way faster

VIA 4-in-1 from CD

Saw a dialog box that had the title "you should not see me" briefly

Reboot

RAID Controller from CD

Reboot

Windows XP SP2 from CD

Reboot

Windows update

Reboot

Windows update

Reboot

Radeon drivers from CD

Reboot

Optimized DivX player from radeon CD

Moebius strip screensaver from radeon CD

Reboot

Soundblaster drivers from web

Reboot

WinTV drivers from web

Reboot

Wintv2000 from web

Scan for channels

Installed Photoshop CS

Installed Photoshop Album 2.0 (which included acrobat reader 6.0 without asking)

Reboot

Open Photoshop Album.  Had to reconnect all missing files since the source drive letter for my data drive has changed, and photoshop album stores absolute paths.  After roughly 10% of my photo collection, Album crashes.  Restarting Album yields better results on the second attempt

With all of XP SP2's emphasis on security, why did I not even get a stern warning that I had no password on my account?  Sure, it does something positive, by requiring the welcome screen rather than logging me in automatically after rebooting, but come on... shouldn't passwords be mandatory, at least on a machine that is going to have any network connectivity?

I decided to start the new year off right in anticipation of my new Dell 2001fp arriving later this week by repaving my desktop.  This is the first set of notes I took while doing the deed before I was sidetracked by the Alias premiere on my TiVo.

Format

Windows XP w/SP1

VIA Ethernet driver from CD

reboot

Downloaded + installed latest 4-in-1 drivers from www.viaarena.com

Reboot

Disabled onboard audio card in bios

Reboot

Loaded onboard RAID driver from VIA CD

Reboot

Windows XP SP2 from CD

Reboot

Installed everything from windows update, except the radeon drivers

Reboot

Radeon drivers from CD

Customized windows

Installed optimized Divx player from Radeon CD

Installed Gargoyle clock screen saver from radeon CD

Organized some start menu items

Reboot

Downloaded latest soundblaster audigy drivers from web

Shutdown

Install audigy card

Install audigy drivers - failed

shutdown

Moved audigy card to lower slot

Install audigy drivers - ok

Reboot

Windows update

Reboot

Getting random crashes - starting over with all PCI cards in from the beginning

Updated BIOS

Format

Windows XP w/SP1

VIA Ethernet driver from CD

Reboot

Disabled onboard audio card in bios

Reboot

Downloaded + installed latest 4-in-1 drivers from www.viaarena.com

Reboot

Loaded onboard RAID driver from VIA CD

Reboot

Windows XP SP2 from CD

Reboot

Installed everything from windows update except the radeon drivers

Reboot

Radeon drivers from CD

Customized windows

Installed optimized DivX player from radeon CD

Installed Fire Caves screen saver from radeon CD

Reboot

Downloaded + installed latest soundblaster audigy drivers from web

Reboot

Installed WinTV Drivers from web

Reboot

Installed wintv2000

Reboot

At some point during the night the power went out in the building, so I don't know if my “does the box run all night without crashing” test would have passed.  More tonight as I keep trudging through.

I finally got around to migrating some of the posts from my old site to DasBlog.  Comments are coming soon... and then I will try to tackle the old radio content. 

I beat Jason.