Just a Quickie because it's late

Busy at work today, did remote stuff on machines in Oregon and three places in Ohio. On the side I re-imaged my laptop (finally got tired of seeing "Hit F11 to recover your PC" every time I booted up.) Sony tried that recovery partition crap while I worked there, we mostly nuked it because customers would see the prompt, and proceed to wipe their machine back to factory defaults. And it eats 6GB of space. Also traded Media Center Edition for Home Edition.

This evening I continued, installing the software I need for this to be both a personal and work travel machine. More to be done tomorrow, but I have 80% done now.

Went shopping - I needed salad stuff, cheese and Q-tips, and ended up spending $93. The only thing I bought that I didn't need was a bottle of Chateau St. Jean Fumé Blanc. It was on sale for $10, and is one of only two wines which I actually liked at a winery tasting. Lately I've been having a glass of wine before bed to help me get to sleep, maybe two or three times a week. It seems to work.

The fish tank water is several notches clearer than it was when I went to work this morning. The gouramis have come out of hiding, along with the male betta, but the female bettas are still parking themselves atop the floating fuzzy plant jungle, partly spooked by the move and partly spooked by the gouramis, I think. Bettas and gouramis both breathe air from the surface as well as through gills, so it's not unusual for them to "hide" near the surface from bigger fish. Next step is to plant some of the floating jungle in the gravel. The stuff ought to grow roots and make a shelter area on the bottom.

Fish Story

Hit Petco after work and picked up a bigger heater for the aquarium. The one in the kit was too small for 30 gallons. Also got some small blue gouramis and a handful of neon tetras and some plants. Now the tank looks fully occupied.

Finishing up loading the new laptop as I type this - slurping up my photos from the machine I'm typing on - and keep getting errors saying a file is in use or protected, even though they aren't. Buggy Microsoft network widget, very annoying. For those pix I'll transfer from DVD.

My boss was in a very strange mood today, I think he's found another job somewhere because he was being very vocal about the fact that everyone blames him for everything. Actually, it's only his boss who does, everyone else knows he's doing better than most people running two under-staffed and under-funded departments and also having to fill in for another department's work which lost all but one of its staff and waited till last week to hire 6 replacements. All of whom are useless until they can find some in-depth tech training.

It was pretty busy today, but for me it was small stuff, follow-ups and I finally succeeded in using my video server to capture video from the network via VideoLAN. Next experiment is to do the same with a DVD of some home movies.