It’s been an exciting week.

First off, the developer that bought the property behind us has finally brought a crew in to start putting in the three single-family residences that will eventually go there, for which I say, “Hallelujah”. I mean, I’m not thrilled that we lose our huge multi-acre buffer between us and our nearest neighbor on our south property line, but Powell Homes is a good company as developers go (we’ve been in constant contact with Todd Powell since they purchased the land, and he seems like a good egg; always gets back to us promptly, encourages us to call him if we have any questions/concerns, etc.). Lots of worse things could have happened with that land. Polygon Homes could have bought it to put up some of their trademarked Crackerjack boxes. A squatter could have started up a meth lab. Some asshat could have bought it to start his unlicensed attack-dog training academy. Having a reputable company put three nice-looking homes on the property was the best alternative to buying it ourselves and seeding it with native plants, something that wasn’t going to happen unless my investment in Lotto futures suddenly matured. Additionally, since they have to put in sewage hookups and their incoming line abuts our property, city ordinance dictates that they provide us with a sewer stub. So we’re going to go seriously into hock and wean ourselves off our septic tank, yee haw! Only savages poop in buckets, even 500 gallon ones. 😉

Then there’s the whole back thing. I went to see a spine specialist who was recommended to me by one of Margaret’s colleagues. He sent me out for an MRI and some other alphabet-soup imaging test whose name I cannot remember; I’ll let y’all know how that goes. The exam itself was, well, it was interesting. I’ve spent the last nine years with reduced mobility and nerve function in my legs due to the laminotomy I had in ’98 to relieve the pain I was suffering from a ruptured lumbar disc. The surgeon who performed the procedure told me that such aftereffects were totally normal and that I would probably have some degree of disability for the rest of my life. This new guy I went to see seemed a bit shocked at the amount of damage I appear to have suffered. This is not encouraging. It has left me nursing an exotic cocktail of maudlin self-pity and burning resentment. The former I plan to smother with a lot of Top Pot donuts. There does not seem to be much I can do about the latter. Perhaps the donuts will leave me too logy to track the bastard down and damage his spine. Or at least key his Lexus. Meanwhile, I’ll have to see what the doc has to say after he takes a look at the MRI and the whatever-o-gram.

Last—and in the cosmic scheme of things, least—I have been wading through the worst, the most problematic, the most annoying computer build of my life. I sold the guts of my old P4 to my father-in-law to help subsidize my new Core 2 Duo gaming rig. Putting that together was relatively easy, once I got over the fact that Ghost would not recognize the NVidia RAID controller on my new ASUS PN532-E SLI motherboard. After I shed my tears, I broke my RAID 1 mirror and the migration went with nary a hitch. This is a seriously cool mobo, if you’re in the market. I’m not an overclocker, but the potential is there in spades, and it has been rock-solid at factory specs. I loaded the thing up with a 2.13 GHz Core 2 Duo E6400 processor, 2 gigs of Mushkin RAM and a 320MB GeForce 8800GTS PCI Express card. This thing is a quantum leap over my old 3.6 GHz P4 with a GeForce 6800GT; so far I am delighted.

Putting Ron’s new computer together did not go nearly as smoothly. This should have been a simple matter of building the new computer (I made him get a new case while we were at it: nothing worse than stuffing all new guts into a geriatric case and having the power switch or something fail three months later), Ghosting the contents of the old drive over to the new one (never, ever just stuff the drive from an old system into a new one; if something goes horribly wrong during the install, you risk being left with no useable system disk) and running a “Repair” install of Windows XP. But for the first time in nearly ten years and maybe eight or ten builds of this type, Ghost punked out on me. Every drive I tried to restore ended up unrecognizable by the Windows installer CD. No matter how I tried to configure it—new or old computer, internal or external disk, ATA, SATA, USB—the fucking disk would not boot or even appear as an installable partition.

After about six different combinations, I gave up and ran out to buy a copy of Acronis TrueImage 10, which has become my new bestest backup buddy. Firstly because it worked, where Ghost would only create chaos out of order. But secondly because, unlike Ghost, the CD that you get when you buy TrueImage contains a fully functional backup/restore program. The Ghost boot CD does not include the ability to actually back up files, folders or disks; only restore them. I figure this is Symantec’s way of keeping people from using a single CD on multiple computers, in flagrant violation of their End User License Agreement. Acronis is apparently not too concerned about this issue: their boot CD is capable of performing a full suite of backup and restore tasks. I also like the fact that TrueImage allows you to build a custom boot CD for use with your system, including all of the drivers you need for special drive controllers, etc. Like any other utility, a good computer nerd should always have more than one backup tool in his utility belt, and I’ll be glad to clip TrueImage on there somewhere.

Anyway, after finally getting a useable boot drive, the rest of the build went pretty smoothly. I think I’m about ready to sit back and let computers do a little somethin’ for me for a bit. I’ve been meaning to look a little more closely at a game called S.T.A.L.K.E.R., now that I have the horsepower to handle it. A weekend of donuts, painkillers and mutants sounds like a good time right now. Oh, and staying the fuck off the highways. Happy Memorial Day, everybody! 😛