For someone who works with computers in one form or another all day long, I am pretty stupid when it comes to computers. Case in point. I woke up early Saturday morning and was just lying in bed wishing I could fall back asleep. I would occasionally hear this odd clicking sound coming from somewhere in my bedroom. It would go away before I could get up and figure out what it was. The day progressed fairly normally although I was out most of the day helping my co-worker Jorge move. Any who, by Saturday night, I hadn't heard the sound again and figured it was some oddball sound coming from outside.

On Sunday, I played a Star Trek DVD on my computer while editing some pictures for the web site. Well, I starting hear the clicking sound again and figured something was overworked and shut down some extra things that were running on the computer. By the end of the evening, I had taken note that I should probably look into it further and maybe even backup my data (which was LONG overdue). I figured I could troubleshoot it Monday after work.

Monday after work came and I started getting reading to exercise. The computer took a little while longer to boot up and the clicking sound was becoming more pronounced. I realized that it was the hard drive that was rapidly degrading. I went ahead and exercised and as soon as I finished, I decided the first order of business was to backup all of my data. Of course, that includes several thousand pictures, years of school work, years of Tau Beta Pi, and my electronic collection of CDs. Not to mention various pieces of data scattered all over the computer. I knew I was in trouble when a DVD that normally takes 6-7 minutes to burn took 40.

I got the critical data backed up by 8:15 or so and it finally dawned on me what a huge disaster this was. I got in the car and drove as fast (within legal considerations of course) as I could to CompUSA to pickup a new hard drive. For some ungodly reason, I actually bought a 250 MB drive (it was only $130). I'd barely filled 20 GB on my current one. I made it out of CompUSA just as they closed. I installed the new drive, connected it to the new ATA133 card, plopped in my Windows XP CD and...nothing...

Since my drive was 250 MB (Windows XP RTM has a 137 MB limit) and connected to a controller card, Windows wouldn't install...after an hour of trying different things, I ran up to work and grabbed a Windows XP SP2 CD to install from. Well, this story is long already, but needles to say I was up till 12:45 AM Monday evening/Tuesday night. I gave up on dual-booting into Linux for now. I've managed to restore most of my data as well as getting Office, Firefox, and a few other essentials installed. I may be a little slow on correspondence for the next few weeks as I get back up to speed.

The title is a tad misleading, but with all of the hoopla about the Patriot Act as of late, I thought it was appropriate. AS of today, you must register to post comments on my web site. This is a nice feature of Movable Type that eliminates the problem of people spamming my comments. No spam comments every appeared in my journal, but I did have to delete hundreds of them behind the scene. The registration feature allows people who have a legitimate comment to make them and it allows me to take back control of my journal.

The registration uses something called TypeKey to register and authenticate commenters behind the scene. Once you have registered, you will be able to post comments to my journal whenever you would like. Also, you can use your registration for any other web site that uses Movable Type and TypeKey.

I hope you don't find this new feature of my journal too cumbersome. If you do, too bad as it's my journal and I like it! By the way...that's two entries in two days!

For the first time in 21 years, I am not taking any classes nor do I have any planned for the fall. It is a truly strange sensation to not have homework or schoolwork or studying hanging over me. I didn't take any summer classes this year because of my vacations as well as desiring some time off after taking classes for 18 months straight. I don't have any classes this fall because I am planning to be in Europe for a couple weeks in September and out west (Utah) for about a week in October. Being gone for three weeks of the semester is not conducive to good grades. :)

Of course, I have managed to find some things to do while not in school. I've finally been able to exercise every day with a regular schedule. I've also been catching up on some reading that I've been postponing. Several of you know that I bought a keyboard (piano) a few months back and have actually had time to practice. Please don't ask me to play anything for you because I suck at it right now. Of course, one would think I would actually be writing in my blog more often...

With that in mind, I do actually plan to do more blogging now and updating this web site more often. I actually had a chance to go through all of my travel pictures from the past few years and plan to be putting up more pictures of recent trips...we'll see how that works out!