The one with the new HP (not to be confused with the New VR).

Sorry about the previous post. I was REALLY lazy.

Two weekends ago, I put Mitake together. That’s right. I backed up all my data, gutted the old Mitake, and put everything together in my new HP that was to be the new Mitake. However, due to some memory errors detected by memtest86, I had to pull out the 512 MB stick of RAM that came with the PC. Somewhere down the line, I’ll probably get another 1 GB module and bring the machine up to a cool 2 GB. Anyway, the video card works like a charm, and I even migrated my LG CD-RW drive over for me to rip CDs and stuff. The trickiest part was the HDD partitioning scheme. I set up the 320 GB as the first drive and the 200 GB as the second drive. The big question was – which WinXP install should I use? I wanted nothing less than MCE 2005 (since it is just Professional with Media Center and remote control support), and I could go with a clean install, which would’ve cost more money (if I wanted to go legal), or I could go with HP’s bloatware-ridden install and then clean it up myself. You can pretty much guess what I ended up doing. I went with HP, since they have the no-hassle recovery partition. However, how could I migrate it over to the new HDD? I did a ton of mucking around, but to no avail – I reinstalled XP three times to learn more about the damn recovery partition. In the end, I popped in the recovery discs I made when I got the PC and booted. Voila – it created a recovery partition on my new HDD. I uninstalled all the HP bloatware (what the hell would you need every single DeskJet and ScanJet driver installed for is beyond me) and did some cleanup before I finally reset my restore point to a good spot. I got my basic torrent downloading and video playback software installed, along with a couple of other minor amenities, but I basically went as minimalist as possible. A full install of all my software at once would quite possibly slow down the PC, especially when I wouldn’t be using the majority of it anytime soon.

So, I shifted things around, created my shares, moved more things around, and redirected the aforementioned shares. I finally have an organized approach to my files, with an easy way to back it all up on the weekends. However, the web server isn’t up yet, as you may or may not have noticed, but I don’t see a need to have one at the moment, so I’ll leave it for now until the time comes for me to do something with it (other than share my files for work). Mitake is born again!

The following week, Eugene’s girlfriend, Jennilee, came up to Thompson for the whole week. Since Eugene was working afternoons at his job, the torch passed on to me to make sure she was comfortable, fed, and kept company. Eugene needs to learn what responsibility is. Anyway, we did have some fun times, and she introduced me to the accursed The Simple Life show. That’s hot. I’m officially addicted. Love it.

One thing to note, however, is that we rented Silent Hill and watched it all the way through. If it wasn’t for the gore, I probably would have liked the movie a whole lot more. Nasty shit – I’m never believing anybody again when they say a horror movie isn’t gory. Liars!

The same day we watched that evil movie, I went to the movies with Candace to see Pirates Of The Caribbean – Dead Man’s Chest. It was the first time we actually hung out outside of work in a social manner. Although the slight tingling in the back of my mind had me thinking that it could’ve been a date, it only looked that way to everybody else, and the truth was that we were just hanging out like regular friends do. We’ll definitely be hanging out again – she’s much more fun to hang out with than James H.

After Jennilee left town, I spent the weekend getting Eugene’s new PC up and running. To reiterate – I still had the majority of Mitake’s old parts, so I tossed in the extra 160 GB HDD from my HP and migrated Eugene’s CD-RW drive over to make him a new PC. Originally, I was going to give Esmond the PC, but he’s going to University soon, and he wouldn’t need it since he has a laptop. So, Eugene got it, and I set it up and gave him the works. He’ll be happy as a camper for a little while longer. At least he’s out of the Pentium III stage for now.

This week has been spent playing The Longest Journey over again from scratch. I got Eugene to pick up a copy of Dreamfall for me when he was in Winnipeg a few weeks back, and now I’ve got the itch to play it, so I decided to familiarize myself with the storyline again and finish the first game before hitting the second one. Seeing as how I’m going to be broke for a year, I’ve got more than my share of things to do to occupy my time and not think about spending money. I’ve also gotten about 125 pages into the gi-normous Hitch Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy trilogy (in five parts, no less). I also have my side hobby of Animal Crossing DS, which, amazingly enough, I’m still playing. I just had my first neighbor move out, so I’m hoping a new one will move in to take her place.

Well, tomorrow is the last day before Esmond heads out to University. I cleared up all my calls this week at work – I only have three left. We’re all leaving at 4:00, early Friday morning. Esmond did a bunch of last-minute packing, but that’s just a family trait, encoded in our freaking DNA from both sides of our families. I just ripped all the J-Pop I received this month today, and I’m slowly listening to each album so that I can clean up my Preorders page. I also got in the figures from Hobby Search, and although I was highly expecting the Housen Ryofu figure from GRIFFON, I was somewhat disappointed by the small size of the figure.

Oh, and another little project I have is the Collections page I’ve had in planning. That will be fun to put together. Since I won’t be buying a digital SLR anytime soon, I’ll just have to borrow my aunt’s newer Canon PowerShot and take the pictures with it.

I’m kind of excited about the Winnipeg trip. It’ll be the first trip we’ve had as a family in a long while. Since I’ve been in Winnipeg more often than Mom and Dad, I can take them to some nice places to eat. I know Mom is going to be upset that Esmond is gone, but so am I, and there’s nothing better than going on an eating binge to ward off depression. I love calories, byaaah!

以上。。。であります。