* It's time for me to turn in my geek badge. Saturday morning I was futzing around on my work machine, which really is my primary machine nowadays because I'm lazy, installing the latest version of "Firefox":http://mozilla.org/, when right after it completed my screen went black. Alright... I waited for a few seconds, and then just figured I should do a hard shutdown. Upon rebooting, my machine wouldn't go back to the windows login screen. It would show the XP startup screen for a few seconds, then kick right back to the BIOS screen and start all over. Nothing I picked worked; Safe Mode, Last Known Good, etc. I started looking online for problems relating to startup and "mup.sys":http://www.annoyances.org/exec/forum/winxp/1082631480, which is the last line that would load before the reboot, and it sounded like it was more of a hardward issue. I took out one memory stick, and then the other. I even tried different slots, and to no avail. Figuring this was too important to screw up or try to do a rebuild on (and re-installing all that damn software, ick.) I brought it to Best Buy. Picked it back up yesterday, and it turns out that there were some corrupt sectors on the disk (head crash, maybe?). Fixed those, and now my machine is back to normal. All I would have had to do it pop in an XP disc to boot from, and try the repair routines, but I've tried that a few times and broken things enough to force a wipe and reformat, so I simply gave up and wussed out. * In the car I was listening to "Whad'ya know?":http://notmuch.com/ on NPR, which is one of my least favorite NPR shows, but it was on, so (shrug). It was the part of the show where he reads questions people have written down and gives his glib, unfunny answers. One was from a woman who wanted to know if she should be the one proposing to her boyfriend. Long story short, she was trying to use the peer pressure to goad him into saying yes. He sounded very un-thrilled, and then finally said yes. I would have probably done the same, and then screeched out of the parking lot and left her there for trying to put on so much public pressure. Show is "here":http://notmuch.com/Show/index.pl if you want to listen to the uncomfortable-ness.

* Poker continued to be good to me, and even with some ups and downs it was a +$500 weekend. I hit "another":http://feralboy.com/log/archives/001479/ ~$250 hand (this time in just a straight $3/6 hand, to give you an idea of how much betting and raising was going on), this time in like a 7-way pot with pocket kings. I've tightened my live and online play up considerably lately. A-x suited in early position? Throw it away. K-10 offsuit early? Throw it away. So far it seems to be working out well.

* House inspection tomorrow. I'll be bringing my camera and taking a zillion pictures, first to give you all a better idea of what it looks like inside, and second so Kim and I can start coming up with a bit of a strategy on getting started on the fixing up. Her lease ends 3 weeks after we close, so we're hoping that we can at least get the flooring and painting in the bedroom done so as not to have to move furniture all around after we're already in. She's quite the ebay maven, so we're going to try and find "everything":http://search.ebay.com/pergo_W0QQfkrZ1QQfromZR8 there and save some bucks.