I had planned to recreate my entire site at the end of 2008, but my wife and I were attempting to purchase a new house and sell ours.  Unfortunately, the sellers of the house we were buying backed out for some questionable reasons.

After a month and a half of vigorous house cleaning, painting, and various updates to make our house more saleable, we are still here and so is the old site.

Soon!  I promise!

I did add some new Windows 7 content in the Computers and Info section.

The culprit was the netstat free site counter.

Those pop-ups were practically viruses!  I've removed all the links from my site.

I also removed some google ad code that was no longer working.

I recently visited my VPC page and it looks like one of my advertisers is using pop-ups.  I didn't know about this.  I will remove whatever is doing this as soon as I can.

Sorry for the inconvenience!!

I recently ordered a couple PC games from gogamer.com and wound up being the daily winner (iPod speaker set).  Cool, but I don't have an iPod.

Then I got an email on November 19th from GoGamer congratulating me on being the monthly winner (a 40GB Sony PS3)!!!!!

So, I am giving GoGamer a little free advertising here, since they've got good prices, and gave me a PS3!!  Nice x-mas present for me!

disclaimer...gogamer did not ask me to blog this, I just did 'cuz I got a PS3. 

BTW, Spiderman3 in blue-ray looks awesome!

I know that the site has been a little slow for a while with not much new content, but that should be changing soon.

My journey back into higher education is nearing it's end for this semester and shortly after for good.  I am looking forward to going back to the "real" world and no longer spend my nights and weekends studying.

I should have more time to try and get this blog updated to the newest version, get RSS working, and make the blog display a little nicer.  Also, I hope to add a lot of new content to the VPC2007 TechRef.  I need to get this done soon to take advantage of VPC's life.

If the rumors are true, VPC will soon be going away...it's a possibility that some client version of Viridian will make it's way into a future SP of Vista or MS's next client OS.

Disappointed with Vista's built-in defrag like I was?  I had purchased the previous version of Diskeeper for XP and like it quite a bit.  

Diskeeper 2007 Pro works great.  I really didn't like Vista running defrag whenever it wanted, so I was happy that DK2007 allows you to disable that and set your own schedules.  Plus, you get that same nice graphical view of your drive defragging, as well as the other nice features like MFT config, etc. 

It's definitely a worthwhile upgrade from Vista's built-in software.

Yesterday, at the dog park near my house, Csilla was attacked and bitten by a Rottweiler.  I wasn't there, my wife was out with Csilla, so I don't have any first hand details.

When they came back immediately after and Csilla was limping, I looked at her leg closely and saw a large 1" gash, she wasn't bleeding yet.  I was very concerned and so we called our vet to bring her in there, but they told us to go to the animal emergency hospital. 

I carried Csi down the steps and put her in the truck and by the time we got to the hospital, she was bleeding from 4 or 5 other puncture wounds and I had a bloody shirt and jeans from carrying her into the hospital.  I've never seen her so scared as when I put her on the examination table; her whole body was shaking.

She had to get 2 staples on the big gash, the vet thought the other punctures were small enough to leave.  Csi is currently on painkillers and antibiotics. 

She's mentally recovered today and is waging her tail again as she limps around the house.

Here's a link to 2 pics of the puncture wounds...warning, they are a little graphic. Be warned!

http://www.essjae.com/images/che/pict2524.jpg zoomed out

http://www.essjae.com/images/che/pict2525.jpg  close up of puncture wounds

http://www.essjae.com/images/che/pict2526.jpg  big cut, with staples

nVidia's latest drivers for the 680i motherboards seem to causing more problems than they're worth.  Since upgrading I've had nothing but problems with the dual NICs.  Whichever one I plug the cable into has it's GW removed by Vista.  Trying to disable both NICs hangs the system.  Trying to add a GW to the NIC with the cable does not allow for network connectivity.

I'm on my second hard reset tonight...all I want to do is get on the Interne and get my email. 

Sure Vista is new, but I also ran 2000 in RC for months and moved to XP ASAP and never had these kind of stability and driver problems.

45 minutes of time wasted on simple networking issues to simply get Vista to not automatically remove the GW from the enabled NIC.

On a happier note, I finally started messing around with OCing my system.

I've had my x6800 up to 3.47GHz, DDR2 at 900MHz.  The memory bump pushed my WEI up by 0.4.  Oddly, going from 2.93 to 3.47GHz made no change.

Processor (x6800 @ 3.47GHz)= 5.8

Memory (2GB @ 900MHz)      = 5.9

Graphics (8800GTX)              = 5.9

Gaming Graphics                  = 5.9

Primary Hard Disk*               = 5.1

* 120GB SATAII 7200RPM...next upgrade is probably to 2 Raptors in RAID0

While Vista is working just fine, I've found that I am unable to either sleep or hibernate.  Vista won't boot back up, all I am getting is either a black screen, or no signal to the LCDs.

Vista boot times are DEFINITELY NOT faster than XP.  I don't like the idea of constantly shutting down and restarting my system OR leaving it running 24/7 again.