Walking to Mars

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Who else remembers NOVA???

I caught an episode this evening (in HD, no less!) and was kind of taken back – I guess I just haven’t really geeked out on the whole space exploration gig for a while, but this one was pretty interesting. An hour of highs and lows about two of the Mars rovers that we’ve explored the red planet with, highlighting a system failure that nearly lost us one of the vehicles and of course, its miraclous comeback. It’s been a while since I’ve searched out some decent high-res photographs from abroad – maybe I’ll have to take some time to do that tonight!

Mental Note: Next year, a trip to Kennedy Space Center most definitely needs to be on my list of weekend adventures. To infinity and beyond… 🙂

computer surgery

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I replaced the NIC in my desktop PC tonight because I’m just plain tired of it losing its connection all of the time. It had gotten so bad that I’d actually created a separate folder on my desktop to save all of the files that I was working on from network drives to after the card went down and I would have to reboot to restore the connections. With the old 10/100 back in, I’ve got multiple torrents running, the FTP, and all of my usual IM and web apps, so I guess now we’ll see if that really was the problem…

I think this just really urks me because this happens to be the second port that’s died on this motherboard in the past couple of months (NIC in this instance is actually an onboard gigabit ethernet controller). A few months back, you might remember my parallel port crapping out one random day and I’ve been connecting my printer and scanner via USB ever since. I bought an ASUS because I always hear everyone raving about them, but so far I’m not impressed. I suppose it does have a three-year warranty, but you know what kind of a pain it would be for me to be without this computer for the weeks that it’ll take them to replace it?

Why can’t things that I buy just work right the first time?!

12/16/2005 – To-Do List

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– go to work, collect slightly more than $200, provide ~9 hours of quality service, come home
– prior to coming home, pick-up Christmas gifts along the way to ease the burden of doing all my shopping this weekend
– get new fish at PetCo so Oscar and the gang won’t feel lonely
– upon returnng home, hang some pictures and clean up odds ‘n ends
– go spend at least 1/2 hour at the gym
– eat “healthy” dinner
– watch The Polar Express
– bedtime

Also…

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I’m none-too-pleased with my dishwasher right now, to the point of almost considering actually doing them by hand…and those who know me well can vouch that it’s certainly gone to extremes! The “heat dry” setting doesn’t dry anything…even overnight, half of my dishes come out with spots still on them, and as long as the thing takes to actually run, you’d think it’d be doing a decent job in there…

I’m going to switch back to Cascade this weekend and see if that helps any – if not… 🙁

It’s beginning to look a lot like…December…

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So am I the only one that just doesn’t really feel in the Christmas spirit this year? And I don’t mean that in a mopey, depressed sort of way – I just don’t feel overcome by the “holiday spirit” like I typically do. Maybe it’s just because I’ve been so busy lately, I really haven’t had much time to stop and smell the gingerbread or something … I don’t know. I did put up my Christmas tree this evening and still have a few more lights that I need to find places for – who knows, maybe it’s just a 2005-thing or something. *shrug*

…

I did, however, also get a chance to watch Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers on TNT HD this evening, which was nice…and would’ve been even nicer without commercials every twenty minutes! I’ll tell ya – I still don’t plan on re-purchasing many DVDs when these HD formats finally come out, but that series is going to be one that will certainly get a second thought. I think maybe Christmas weekend will end up hosting my Lord of the Rings DVD marathon; I ended up watching The Matrix last night instead, but I hadn’t seen that one in quite a while, either.

Come to think of it, aside from watching movies and renewing my lust for Warcraft 3, I guess I didn’t do a whole hell of a lot this weekend! But then again, I guess we all need weekends like that every now and again, and if I can get the most of my work done during the week, then I suppose I’ve earned it… 😛