Sunday, December 28, 2003
Bâtard Fils de Croque Madame with Patrick for breakfast. Technically there is no such recipe—it was my own invention because I wanted a Croque Madame for breakfast but we didn't have all the right ingredients. So the recipe is simply: Make an approximation of a croque madame sandwich using whatever ingredients you have at your disposal and modify the recipe to your liking. For us, that was: sliced country French bread, eggs, bacon, tomatoes, grated parmesan cheese, margarine. Delicious! Washed my car. Lunch at home with Patrick: soup for me, soup and a bagel. Grocery shopping at Tower Market with Patrick. Put the new car cover on my car for the first time. Dinner at home with Patrick: DiGiorno Pizza. Installed the Antec Easy USB device which I purchased to put 2 USB ports on the front of one of my computers. They should have called it "Hard USB" instead, however, because it was not easy to install. I have an Abit KT7A-RAID motherboard which I purchased in January 2001 and the USB header on it didn't match the default for Antec's Easy USB, so I had to manually rewire the cable they supplied and had to replace the header with one with the correct key pin since theirs used a different key pin. Did troubleshooting on the computer that's having problems—didn't want to do brain surgery just yet if I can avoid it. The problem is that the CD-RW/DVD combo drive gives a blue screen of death randomly when playing DVDs, and it also fails to write CD-Rs or CD-RWs successfully. Other than that it's working fine. Reinstalled Windows XP Service Pack 1a. Replaced the cpu fan. Cleaned another nearby fan (tho I don't know what it was cooling). It played Baraka with no error until the very end when it popped up the dialog asking you to report the problem to Microsoft. Removed the combo drive, inserted the old DVD drive. Hooked up the tape backup again. Restarted twice to ensure that both devices were being detected. Installed tape backup software, restarted again. Updated anti-virus on 3 computers. Ran virus check on 3 computers. Moderate rain late tonight. Patrick framed some of his Lodestar artwork as a gift for Sam. Ran defragment on 3 computers. Clean-reinstalled ZoneAlarm on the problem computer.