Today was a day of losses. A day of mourning. My little toe nail finally fell off. It was the first casualty of my body from my Grand Canyon adventure. I’ll post my story about that ordeal as soon as I write it all down. I’m saving the nail, I might put it in my medicine cabinet ala The Fly. Any guesses as to what else might come off? I have a big toe that is smelling bad.

I upgraded my computer today. I installed a few new drivers for my video card, my Via chipset, and then threw in a GeForce 3 I’ve had laying around. I was trying to play Unreal Tournament 2003, but failed miserably. The demo is still too buggy on my machine. I managed to only get fragged by a bot before it crashed again. At least the Wolfenstein’s demo was better done. That’s an awesome game. I noticed that my new video card is a lot smoother than my GeForcePro 2. I’ll see if my friend Charlie wants to buy this card from me. Or I’ll eBay it. I need to up my feedback.

Well, after I installed the card, my computer didn’t start up. That was scary. I reseated the card and it worked. Then I wanted to move a power plug around. I did that during a reboot and it wouldn’t start up. I unplugged my hard drive’s power, removed the CMOS battery, and then it started to bring up the BIOS screen. I was so happy because I had spent 5 minutes trying to get even that. Then I did something really stupid, I tried to plug in my hard drive’s power while the computer was on. I saw a spark jump and shorted my computer. It shut down and then I was really pissed at myself. I was thinking about how I would figure out which component had failed. Then I was even more pissed at myself. Then I thought how much it would cost to replace the power supply, motherboard, cpu, or RAM. Then I thought about all the data I could have lost on my harddrive. Now I was super pissed at myself. Why didn’t I shut down my computer and then plug it in!!!

I relaxed and tried to go through everything to fix it again. I unplugged my CMOS battery, reset the BIOS and it started up again. There was a tense period where I waited from my hard drive to spin up and then to see the Windows screen come up again. Everything looks good so far. Hope it stays that way. Phew. That was the near loss of the day.

The other losers for the day are the Washington Redskins. Be sure you see Steve Spurrier’s masterful PPBBBBTTTTT on SportsCenter tomorrow. It was pretty funny to see. Right now he’s losing 30-7, Wufferel just threw an interception, and he’s wondering why he ever left Florida. He was a god there. I’m sure things will start to pick up for them.