At the library today, I found ‘A Childhood Remembered’, which is my favourite CD of all time. I’ve had five copies of the cassette and three copies of the CD, which I either gave away or wore out completely. Now I have the songs on my computer in MP3 format, mine forever. *happy sigh*

I first found this music when I was thirteen in a pagan shoppe. I’d recently discovered my lack of Christianity and was scared and thrashing and not knowing what to do and seeking. I didn’t know anything about anything. My best friend played a track from this song on the store’s music player, and I was calmed and entranced, lulled. I bought the cassette and began a journey that day.

I listened to this nearly every night for something like four years. This is the music I played as I learned to drive. This is the music that soothed me to sleep during some of the scariest, roughest nights I faced as a young blossoming adult. This is the music I played for my unborn babies for the duration of each pregnancy. This is the music that I whistled, hummed, sang, and danced.

With the exception of Alanis, this is the music that has been the most prominent soundtrack of my life.

After 20 hours of toil and trouble, our new desktop Samus is running perfectly!

She is a brand-new eMachines T5254 with two 2.1 GHz processors, 2 GB of RAM, and an Nvidia GEforce 8500, running (drum roll…) Windows XP.

Tower: $400
Monitor: $120 (but we could have gotten a comparable one for $80)
Graphics card: $80
Sound card: $40
Optical mouse: $10 (why are these not standard already?)
Total: $650

That’s a very nice complete setup for only $650, and we could have gone even lower if not for a few of our peculiar preferences. We got the tower, graphics card and sound card from Best Buy and the monitor and optical mouse from Discount Electronics.

Our motivation for getting a new desktop is that the games we want to play don’t run on our laptops, or when they do run, they don’t run well. We’re usually on the couch when we play games on our laptops, so as long as we get a graphics card with an S-Video out, we can play on the TV. The integrated graphics card (which was actually pretty nice, a GEforce 6 series) didn’t have an S-Video out, so we upgraded to a very nice one, the 8500.

The reason we needed a sound card is because the onboard sound card was proprietary, and the manufacturer has only released drivers for Vista. We wanted to wipe Vista and install XP, and when we did so, we couldn’t get any sound at all. So basically, we needed to get a stupid sound card just so we could run XP instead of Vista. Phooey on proprietary hardware specs, phooey on integrated sound and video cards, and most of all, phooey on Vista. PHOOEY!

What follows is the story of the 20 hours of toil and trouble we incurred when wiping Vista to install XP. I’m posting it in the hopes that it can save someone else from spending as much time futzing with it as I did.

The first thing to do is to remove Vista. A decent overview can be found at http://removevista.com, but I’ll go into a little more detail here, because that site has things like “make a boot CD and use it” which could use a little more detail. So, here are my instructions for how to wipe Vista and install XP.

1. Download the Ultimate Boot CD. It is an ISO file, which is a file type meant to be burned to a CD.
2. Burn the Ultimate Boot CD ISO file to a CD. Be sure to burn it as an ISO file: your CD burning program might do the right thing if you just double-click on the ISO file. It’s easy to make the mistake of burning a data CD that contains just one file (the ISO file), but that won’t work. So check to make sure the CD has more than one file on it when it’s done burning.
3. Back up all data you wish to save.
4. Put the Windows XP install CD in your CD-ROM drive and boot up your computer. Mine says [F10] Boot Menu when I’m booting up, so I hit F10 and it asks me which device I’d like to boot from. I pick CD-ROM, and then after a bit it says “Press any key to boot from CD” so I press a key.
5. Press R to repair an existing installation
6. fixboot c:\
7. fixmbr c:\
8. exit
9. Put the Ultimate Boot CD in the CD-ROM drive and reboot, using the same F10 procedure.
10. Select Hard Disk Tools -> Disk Manager 10 (Samsung).
11. Format the C: drive. It doesn’t matter which version of Windows you pick, because we’re going to reformat later.
12. Put the Windows XP install CD back in the CD-ROM drive and reboot.
13. Install Windows XP! In the process, you can reformat the drive as NTFS.

I learned most of these steps from removevista.com, and filled in the missing knowledge about boot CDs by hours of painful futzing. Also, I learned that if you have an XP CD that isn’t bootable, you’re hosed. (Unless you can find some way to boot with the boot CD and then hotswap CDs, which I lost patience with figuring out.)

After XP is done installing, be sure to connect to the Internet to let it download all its service packs and vulnerability fixes and stuff.

Install the drivers for the Nvidia GEforce card. This was no problem.

Then I tried to play a game. This was the point where I got “out of range” and “cannot display this video mode” errors. The monitor would just go blank and display that error. The TV would work fine via the S-Video cable, but the monitor was hosed. I futzed with this for several hours. I changed the refresh rate, changed the resolution, mucked about with safe mode, returned the monitor and got a new one, nothing helped. Then I finally stumbled across the solution: download the latest DirectX patches. I also installed the latest drivers for my monitor, but I don’t know whether that made any difference.

Then I tried to play a game, and it crashed for a different reason. I checked the log file and found that it was crashing when trying to initialize the audio. This was because the integrated sound card was not detectable by XP and the manufacturer did not release any XP drivers. Grr! So we went out and bought a cheapo sound card, and we couldn’t get the drivers to recognize it. Grr. EDIT: See Randy’s comment below for a link to the drivers for the onboard audio card! This would have saved us so much hassle!

I went into the BIOS and disabled the onboard sound card. That didn’t fix the problem. I left it disabled, so it might have helped later; I’m not sure. I think it was like [F2] on boot, then Integrated Peripherals or something, then HD Audio.

So we returned the cheapo sound card and got a slightly less cheapo sound card, a SoundBlaster (because I know I can download drivers for those), and that worked except that there was an annoying amount of static interference. We spent another several hours trying to fix the static. We checked the speakers, it wasn’t the speakers. We moved the sound card to a slot further away from the video card, and that didn’t help. We tried putting various things between the sound card and the video card, and that didn’t help. We tried turning the wireless off, and that didn’t help. We tried muting the line in and the CD audio, and that didn’t help. We knew it was the video card causing the interference, because we’d get far more audio static when we’d do something 3D and graphics-intensive. But we couldn’t figure out what to do about it. Finally we just went back to Best Buy and bought a SoundBlaster Audigy SE for $40, popped it in, and it worked like a charm. Yay for throwing money at the problem! I don’t know if the other semi-cheapo used sound card we got (a SoundBlaster Audigy 2) was just bad, or what, but buying a new one did the trick. Yay!

Now Kyeli is playing Sims 2, which is running smoothly and not even thinking about crashing. We have a beautiful desktop background, a perfect couch setup, working audio, working graphics, and a really great new computer. All is well, and I’m quite pleased with myself. (: Kyeli was very helpful too; I couldn’t have done this without her help. *kiss* (:

I had an epiphany today, catalyzed by two unlikely sources: Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn and speed demos. In Radiant Dawn, there’s a conversation between Yune and Ike that goes something like this:

Yune: “You humans are so interesting. You fumble around and you really don’t know what you’re doing, but you strive so hard and fight so passionately for what you believe in. Even when you don’t really know what you believe in!”

Ike: “That’s right. I’ll fight for what I believe in until my dying breath. I’ll never stop.”

And speed demos. These people practice for months, years even, to get the perfect run and get the world record on some obscure video game. They try it, then get 40 minutes in and make a mistake, so they start all over.

What’s the #1 predictor of success, at anything? Skill. What’s the #1 predictor of skill, in any domain? Time on task. And what’s the #1 predictor of time on task? Motivation. It all comes back to motivation. If you’re motivated to do something, you’ll practice it, you’ll become skilled at it, and you’ll succeed. If you’re truly passionate about something, or obsessed, or just struck by a passing fancy that takes a long time to pass, you can achieve amazing feats of awesomeness.

But what do you do when the fancy passes? Do you stick with it, or do you move on to the next thing? In the past, I’ve usually moved on to the next thing. There have been a few notable things I’ve stuck with and finished, but I often drop them and move on to something else, or to nothing productive. The question of motivation is the most important one to answer when Kyeli and I are planning our 2nd company. How are we going to motivate ourselves? If we refuse to use fear-based motivational techniques (and we do), how are we going to discover and practice love-based ones? We know that we can succeed wildly at anything when we set our minds to it, so the key becomes setting our minds to it. Or really, setting our hearts to it.

I think I have low blood sugar. Reasons I suspect this include:

• My brain gets really fuzzy up to an hour or two before mealtime. I get very spacey and irritable, and I have trouble making decisions.
• After I eat a large meal, I often go into a food coma. I go into a slump and have low mental and physical energy.
• I also often slump around 3 or 4 in the afternoon.
• I’m ravenous throughout the first half of a meal, sometimes even longer.

For the past few days I’ve been trying to eat smaller meals at mealtimes and eat healthy snacks every two hours or so. It’s greatly decreased my frequency of slumpiness and my frequency of spaciness/bitchiness. We’ll try it for a while and see how it goes. I’m also going to try varying my foods somewhat and see if I notice any differences in how I feel.

In other good health news, Debbie from Good Life Modalities seems to have fixed the circulation in my feet and hands! My hands and feet, most notably my feet, used to get cold easily. But for the past few weeks, they’ve been totally great! In fact, I’ve been uncomfortably warm when wearing the socks that I usually wear! This is really impressive. She is really awesome. In fact, I’m paying for another session with her out of my own spending money, because we already exceeded our “crap” budget this month due to getting car troubles fixed, and I didn’t want to wait until next month. I think I’m sending a good message to myself that my health is worth spending my own money on.

Hopefully these positive physical changes will improve my mental well-being too. (: