Vacation
As is the case with many, I will be on vacation starting at the end-of-business on Friday until the 2nd of January. Though unlike the rest of the population I will not be going anywhere nor will I be doing anything extraordinary. I will be doing the usual stuff such as visiting family and being one of the many to go out on New Years only to realize again that New Years sucks and that it is always an awful time. But my vacation will mainly revolve around the three “R”s: rest, relaxation, and reading. I also plan on playing video games, namely Halo 3 and Guitar Hero 3, and watching a few movies, first and foremost “I Am Legend“. I should point out that I do have a few things that I intend to get done. Including but not limited to purchasing presents for the familia, purchasing a new bookcase, fixing my desktop computer, taking my Macbook Pro to the Apple store to get the battery fixed, and organizing my digital photos.
The desktop computer I have started acting weird on reboot yesterday. By acting weird I mean it wasn’t working. The system would attempt to boot but neither of my monitors would leave standby mode. The motherboard was working fine as the lights were being lit, the hard-drives were spinning, and there wasn’t any warning beeps being emitted from the board. But the keyboard wasn’t able to reset the system using ctrl-alt-del. After spending some time troubleshooting the situation it turned out to be the video card. The boot process would make it far enough for the BIOS to recognize the video card, but then it would immediately stall the boot-up, thus the reason why it wouldn’t interpret the keyboard input. Annoying to say the least, but I ordered another video card from Buy.com, hopefully all will be well.
The Macbook Pro on the other hand has an issue with the battery. After a full-charge I can only get about 40 minutes of standby out of the system. I recently checked the capacity and it was at 39% after a full-charge, meaning the battery is slowly losing its ability to not only be charged but to hold a charge. This issue makes me glad that I’ve begun backing up my Macbook Pro with Time Machine, but I have yet to backup my desktop Vista machine. I think it may be time to go out and purchase a Windows Home Server machine.
Finally I need to move my gallery off of my personal web-server and onto either Flickr or Google’s Picasa Web Gallery. My first job is to organize all the pictures on my NAS drive and then figure out whether to go with Flickr or Google. I might as well back-up the pictures and organize my hard-drive while I’m at it too.
Ahh sounds like a fun little vacation I have planned.