Life, Death, and Taxes

Some of my faithful readers may have noticed a slight drop-off in the postings lately, and here are the three reasons:

LIFE:

As some of you know, I work for a local yellow page company and three times a year we go into deadline. Two of these occasions during the year are no sweat. A little overtime and some extra work. No big deal.

However, in January we start working on the Tomball directory, which is our biggest book. This is where things get hectic. We placed a large ad in the local newspaper in town and suddenly I have an influx of brand new half-page to full-page ads. Long story short, they take awhile to do. Overtime out the butt, and this week is the start of it. Usually I get a chance to play around at work for a few hours (spent over the whole day) but not this week. Work, work, work, work, and oh yeah, more work.

I’ve also been busy trying to get everything prepared for the big move at the end of February. I’m not moving far, just about a mile in the other direction. Went and looked at the apartments last Saturday and really liked it. Very nice and well kept, and the price is just perfect.

DEATH

For the past two weeks, my [future] roommate Heath and I have been trying to get a marathon-run of Neverwinter Nights multiplayer action on my friend’s server, but have failed both times. The first time was just a fluke: the server was down and my friend wasn’t home to hit the “reset” button.

The second time was much more deadly. So Friday night we are playing around and I’m showing him the various areas in the game. We got about an hour and a half of play in before the shit hit the fan.

I reboot windows. “Error, cannot find the files in the directory ‘c:\windows\system\system32′”

I said, “What?!”

So just like I have to at least once every month, I pull out the WindowsXP Full Install disc and put it in the drive, ready to wipe and reinstall. Wrong. Nothing installs. First it gets half through the install process and the screen locks up, or just reboots entirely. This happens the rest of Friday night.

Saturday I wake up and pick up where I left off (a full format) and try again. Now it keeps giving errors while just COPYING files from the CD-Rom. No sweat, that’s why I have two of ‘em. Nope, that one does the same thing.

Sunday I didn’t even turn the damn thing on until about 8pm that night. No progress, same errors, same frustration. This continues for another two hours, where on a whim, i decide to reach down and yank the oldest peice of memory in the box. I turn the machine back on, and suddenly EVERYTHING IS FINE. WindowsXP installs perfectly. In fact it installed SO perfectly it’s been performing better than it ever has.

ONE STICK OF MEMORY. One stupid rectangular block of diodes and circuits. One $20 peice of shit that could have cost me the price of two new hard drives (that was the original diagnosis.) So that’s Death. Death of memory.

TAXES

Got my W-2 at work yesterday. I’ve never made this much money my entire life, and I don’t know where it all went. My roommate told me “you’ve got a lot to show for it” which pleased me, because I thought the opposite.

I didn’t wait long to file. I received it around 9:30am. It was filed by noon. I even did the advance return so it’ll be here within the week, if all goes well. I plan on using the money for my moving expenses come the end of next month. We’re putting the application fee in on Saturday, and the deposit next week. Huzzah!