Tuesday, September 2, 2003
Spent the morning working on Mike Lemont's computer. Lunch at desk: peanut butter and grape jelly sandwiches, pretzels, water. Spent the afternoon coding furiously while our network connection went live and dead due to problems that our network administrators were trying to resolve. Our entire public affairs subnet was down since Thursday or Friday and I got about 3 hours of work time on it today before it went down again. Grr! Dinner at home with Patrick: deep-fried chicken boobs, macaroni and cheese, green salad with feta and croutons. Installed our new 120 GB hard drive. Whee! Was not able to successfully copy over the former C: drive, so set it up anew. No problems now—perhaps it's because I installed current anti-virus and a firewall and certain patches (Nimda, Sobig, Nachi, Blaster) before hooking up the ethernet connection. Office XP installed without a hitch. Updates installed no problems. So the original problem we had—choppy sound during MP3 play and frames dropping during DVD play—was either the combo drive tracking problem or the hard drive or quite possibly both. Only when both were eliminated did everything go smoothly. Next steps: set up K9 and Outlook, send in the combo drive for repair, decide how I want the remaining partitions, copy over data from the old D: drive, test music and DVD, set up apps. However, it's midnight now—time for bed!