NEWS:

02.16.04 - Terrence Marks:

And we've got two more! By Brian Daniel on Monday Celeste Smith on Wednesday! If you'll notice, I'm doing most of the news-writing lately. Reason for that is Isabel is very hard at work on a variety of other projects. And since I took the last few weeks off, now it's her turn. And Valentine's Day. This is our last weekend in Florida, so we spent the day with my family. Our real Valentine's Day things were yesterday. We got family pictures taken; hopefully they'll come out well. Isabel and I were apprehensive, but things went nicely. My main plan for the day, being as this was the last day I'd have to hang out with my father and brother, was to sit around and watch Mystery Science Theatre 3000. I spent a few weeks letting my spare computer suck up all our bandwidth while downloading episodes. I tried to burn them to VCDs - so I could play them on a TV instead of having everybody watch them in my room on my computer - and discovered that the average CD had enough space to hold 90% of an episode. Fortunately, one of my co-workers had a DVD burner. So I picked five episodes (Santa Claus Conquers the Martians, The Day The Earth Froze, The Crawling Eye, Gamera vs Baguron, and Robot Holocaust) and had them converted. He gave the DVDs to me in a nice 5-CD holder. So I burned him 10 more discs of MST3k and returned the holder to him - may as well share the entertainment. Anyhow, I put the DVDs in one of my many CD cases. Which all got packed and shipped to California five days ago. So none of the local rental chains have MST3k on DVD - they've got it on videotape, but that'd be more useful if we had a working VCR. We went out to Royal India with my extended family and had a very nice dinner. And after the dinner, within minutes of us coming home, my dad went to sleep. My brother left to go hang out with friends. So it all worked out in the end, kind-of.

02.18.04 - Terrence Marks:

I'm going through a full reinstall of Windows XP. When I last reloaded, I repartitioned my primary master drive and it wound up as F: (with my primary slave as C: and CD-ROM drives as D: and E:). Then I installed Windows 2000 Server on the slave drive (which it calls D:, while it says the master drive [known in WXP as F:] is really C:). It's just more trouble than it's worth. And since this is the last time I'll have a spare HDD to use as a data sump, I may as well get it taken care of. If it were just the drive it'd be one thing, but since I've got a variety of folders and such left over from W2k Server, it's just easier to clean everything off. So I've been burning things to CD. Music is easy to burn - it comes in nice discrete chunks called albums that run about 60-160MB each and those can be easily divided into genres. Anime is less so; I'm anal enough to try to get CDs that are just one series in order. So because I'm missing a few episodes of Tenshi no Shippo Chu, f'rex, I've been letting it sit on my drive for months. Manga is even worse, because the divisions are too small. I can put a hundred chapters of various things, but since I don't always collect them in order, I'll never be able to figure out which of my five discs has chapter 4 of Rough or volume 2 of Kero Kero Chime. And I have chapter 3 of Addicted to Curry, but did I burn the first two chapters to disc or delete them in a fit of boredom? So yeah, that's all why I'm going to reload my computer.

02.20.04 - Terrence Marks:

Well, we're getting on the plane today. By now, our computers are probably disconnected and packed. We've got a stopover in the Los Vegas airport and we're just hoping they have a few slot machines so we can pass the time. At this point, the next story arc should be starting. Yes, it is a Syd Barrett quote. And I decided not to reinstall Windows anyhow. Just wiped W2k from the machine. It's easier that way. I'll need to edit the boot.ini file soon - adding Isabel's hard drive to my computer today (because we're leaving the computer she was using here). And I'm working on restoring portions of the UM archive. And on Mario & Luigi (I beat Ma Piranha! Go me.). We're pretty much packed. I said my goodbyes to everybody - my family, my friends, my co-workers. And Tate and Tony. *sigh*. It's hard to leave Florida behind...or, well...it's easy to leave Florida itself behind. It's just the people there that I'm going to miss. I spent the last few months knowing I should spend more time with people but realizing that it wouldn't do much good since I'd be leaving soon. But I'm off to California and the better opportunities that it presents me. I think I'm going to like it there. We got the last of our large boxes mailed out on Wednesday. The post office probably hates me now. And I cut it back to 3 news articles on the front page because it was getting a bit much. I'll be adding all this (and more) to the archives real soon now.