Major Geekery

I’m writing this post on my new computer! Last Wednesday I got fed up waiting for my old machine to perform seemingly non-stressful tasks like installing the latest test build of Encarta Reference Library 2005. It was highly frustrating, so on Thursday morning after Rona got back from her first set of trumpet lessons at Eckstein, I headed off to Fry’s Electronics in Renton, armed with a list of components gleaned from outpost.com. After a relatively painless trip through the store filling a shopping cart, and after a relatively painful checkout ordeal, I headed back home, and got back in time for Rona to leave for school again.

I was going to wait until the weekend to share the assembly of my new toy–I mean workstation–with Brian, but I was itching to dive in and let the shrinkwrap fly. The poor stack of boxes never stood a chance. By the time I finally crawled into bed that night I was installing Windows XP Pro on my shiny new computer.

I want to list out all the components, complete with links, but having already happily rattled off the list to Brian and Eric (and to my dear, ever-patient Rona), I’m pretty sure no one else would be very interested. (Well, maybe you, Jampet, but I can show it all to you if you ever manage to make it the three miles down the street to our house!)

Anyway, to compound my geeky joy, I popped in a random spare hard drive and set to installing Linux as well. After three attempts I finally have it set up so that I can boot into either Win XP or Linux. In fact, I am writing this post via the Opera Web browser in my spiffy new Linux OS.

I’m very pleased with my new machine, and with the two new feats I can add to my Nerd Profile: I’ve successfully assembled my own computer, and I figured out how to make Windows and Linux play nicely together–well, near each other, anyway. What’s next? Perhaps a Serial ATA RAID array? Or maybe I’ll try out FreeBSD–I hear it’s more stable than Linux…

In the world of new parenthood, everyone is doing fine. Zoey seems to be okay with spending more time sleeping at night, which we’re hoping will be the new trend. She’s making all kinds of noises these days, some of them seemingly in response to those wacky noises her parents make at her all the time.

We have (by which I mean Zoey has) been having lots of family visits lately, which is very nice. We’ve been seeing lots of Barb and Robert, and Bonnie is going to start coming over a lot to watch the Sopranos–er, I mean to see Zoey. (Nah, I was right the first time.) My parents are coming back up this next weekend to help us haul yard waste to the transfer station and to visit Ikea. I hear tell my brother is heading on up from hot, windy California for a weekend in about a month, to meet his new niece and to hang out, which will be fun.

I promise to post some new baby pictures very soon over on frogtaco.net. Now, though, is time for sleep. G’nite!