del c:\ /f /s

This weekend our refrigerator stopped performing it's normal job, and now it is mostly just taking up space. We've already lost two quarts of milk, and our ice is starting to melt in the freezer. It's getting pretty smelly in there too, what with our 95 degree weather. Also, our pool was closed off due to someone deciding to *ahem* excrete feces into it. So my son is driving Therese crazy because he can't swim today. Our kitchen sick faucet is leaking as well. Only about 132 days until we should be in our new home...

My wife just called and told me that she just saw someone put over $30(USD) into her Toyota Camry. Gas prices are at $2.47(USD) at our local warehouse retailer's "low-cost" fuel center.

So we woke up this morning with a bit of a shock. It felt almost exactly like 9/11 all over again when we heard NPR reporting that terrorists had bombed London's tubes and busses. My first reaction was one of slight stupor, "How could they do this to innocent people?" After a little while, I started to get angry. I wanted to just bomb/nuke the heck out of any terrorist out there. The problem is that they are often so skilled at blending in that it is very difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff. You will kill innocent people if you try and just bomb them. It seems like no one is willing to give in, and so I don't see how this conflict can reach a good conclusion.

We got a finalized offer on our house in a record 5 days, and now the job of actually moving begins. We are moving to a great new neighborhood in Cherokee County with lots of walking trails, pools, forest and fields, etc. Therese has been working her arse off putting most of this move together, and I've only just started to be able to help out. We worked on the garage this weekend, and we cleared out a bunch of garbage. It's funny how much "plaque" you build up when you live in a house. Little bits of plastic or metal that you think you might need later for some project sometime just kinda accumulate. I still can't bring myself to throw out network cards, or video cards, or old hard drives. Anyway, during our cleansing of the garage, I found out that our hot water heater is leaking. Oh, joy... Of course, since we have a buyer and a closing date, the whole house is going to start falling in on itself. Luckily, Home Depot got someone out to us at 10:30 AM after I ca...

After my troubles with cutting the aluminium, I went out and got a got a little set of Dremel cuttoff wheels. I went through about 5 of them, but I was finally able to cut out the hole for the back panel of the motherboard: I'll need to repaint the back panel to help clean it up, but it looks ok right now. I've tried setting an adapter card into the board, and I've found that the board is sitting a bit higher up than I had originally thought. So now the adapter cards don't fit into the case any more. I'm not sure how I'm going to solve this right now.

I had a little trouble cutting the slots for the tabs that are on the bottom of adapter cards today. I burnt up a Dremel cutting bit, and broke a drill bit trying to get through the bottom of the enclosure. I remember reading something about "cutting oil", so I might need to get some of that when I get a new Dremel bit for cutting. I'll do some more looking around to see what others are doing. I did find a power supply that might work for me. It's made for a 2U rackmount server, but it has the proper dimensions to fit next to the mother board. My only concern is going to be noise. I'm guessing that since it goes into a server, it is going to be loud. I'll keep looking, but it is encouraging to find something with the right dimensions. I also stumbled across the ATI All-in-wonder X800 XT . Seems like the perfect card, but I'm going to have to make sure it works with whatever OS I'm going to go with. Speaking of OS, I'm thinking about going ...

Today, I made a little more progress on the HTPC. I had to cut some bulges out of the bottom of the enclosure to clear the ATX motherboard I am using in this project. Here's a shot of that: I tapped a few holes to put in the motherboard stand-offs to have something to mount the motherboard to. I had to do a little more hacking to get the motherboard mounted properly since the bottom of the enclosure is uneven. I used two plastic stand-offs that I cannibalized from the old DVD player, and I had to use some washers to move up one of the stand-offs. Otherwise, the motherboard went right in. I made sure to allow room for the adapter cards to fit. I'll need to cut some slot holes into the bottom of the enclosure to actually allow the tabs to go through the bottom. Here's a shot of the motherboard mounted for testing the fit: So far so good, the hard part is going to be getting a DVD drive, a power supply, and a disk or two into the beast. I'm thinking about a slim-l...