... And We're Back.

As I wrote, I had some sort of desktop meltdown. In fact, I had a catastrophic failure of all my tech. After I got the PC restored there seemed to be a problem with my hard drive. As I was working on that, my laptop dropped off my Wi-Fi network, seemingly for no reason. And I lost the headphones to my Palm/MP3 player. I can't use those earbud thingies. I think I have mutant ears or something because they don't fit or stay in my ears. The headphones I prefer are around 20 dollars and there's just no wiggle room in the budget right now. I could cut out a bottle of vodka from my weekly liquor budget... AS IF!

In any case, I ran the disk check/repair software and got my hard drive sorted. Then I worked on my connectivity problem. After determining my router was working I had enough brains to get in and look at the router settings. After poking around for a while I figured out that somehow during reinstalling my OS, my router had regenerated the WEP encryption key and locked my laptop out of the network. After that, I simply entered the new key into the connection settings ... and we're back.

The headphone problem was solved courtesy of Jet Blue. They give you headphones on the flight for free but for a dollar you can buy a pretty damn good set of headphones that you can keep after the flight. You can keep the free ones too but they suck.

So I spent most of today restoring programs and tweaking my desktop. I had no idea how much I had customized my system until I had to re-create it. I'm still not done. I basically restored my system back to around 2003. I had to install Windows updates for several years until I finally got up to Service Pack 2 updates. I also had to update Internet Explorer and the Media Player and re-install the scanner, printer and my Palm. Photoshop too.

On a personal note, this is the first year I didn't beat myself up over the fact that I have a really difficult time working out/staying in shape during the holidays. I basically haven't worked out in over a month. I ate whatever I wanted and drank whenever I felt like it. Pasta and a loaf of bread at midnight. The horror! I knew damn well I wouldn't do it for very long. I finally saw the light (or the fat roll) this week. And so it's back to the gym and a few weeks of dieting. A little South Beach low carb action and a lot of cardio. Today was day one. I did 1/2 hr. cardio and 1/2 hr. on the abs. I also did a litle fake n' bake to dispel the winter pallor. Tomorrow I hit the weights. I want to be all fat-free and sexy (at 45 yrs., I'll settle for fat free) by the spring.

Oh look, I just got a South Beach Diet E-Mail... seriously.