Settling in.

As mentioned, I was considering building a new PC as a present to myself.

The fact that someone else would like to buy the old one sped up the process, so here we are as I type at the new one, checking things over before I go to take the old one downstairs and give it a good hard reformatting and setting it up for the new owner.

All my data is -here-, but I'm having to set a lot of things back up again, even if it's just to tell Steam to re-download a bunch of stuff (thank you, Steam!) or to try reimporting all my music into iTunes and then sorting away all the duplicates (quite a few, actually...)

It's a lot like moving into a new house. Everything is -here-, but I have to work out where everything needs to go.

So far, though? Not too bad.

Frazzled but unbowed

After spending a surprising amount of my morning and early afternoon hunting up a floppy disk so I could get the SATA drive in the old PC playing nice with the windows CD, the afternoon was spent setting up Nancy's new PC, making chili, and a run to Home Depot for new light switches.

We had ef_111 and flaggerx over for chili and computers, and in the process asked Dave if he'd mind taking a look at the balky lightswitches for the upstairs hallway.

It's never good when the electrician says, "Hey, do you have a camera? I haven't seen one this bad in awhile!"

Instead of using 3 position switches for the hallway, we'd correctly guessed that previous owner (ie: Dipshit) had decided to use 1 positions at each end of the hall. What we didn't know was that he'd done a spectacular job of miswiring that included splicing the live current into the ground wire on both switches.

The other thing you really don't like hearing is "Man, I'm really impressed you didn't have an electrical fire yet."

We also need to replace the hallway light now that the switches are fixed, but that's on the list to do tomorrow.

After Dave and Nancy absconded for the hockey game, Alex and I had a brief period of "Are we done for the day, or...?" to determine our next step, and it was decided that we really ought to get off our asses and do more Christmas shopping.

While the gifts bought or stores visited are a secret, I can say that my shopping is basically done, but it took trips up to Carriage Place, Sawmill Rd, Tuttle, and Easton before we were done. We've still got a little bit left to do, but I think that the last bits and a nice bit of present wrapping will be done tomorrow to hopefully finish it all off.