Time's flying by. September is over in less than 36 hours ... crazy.

I reloaded my home computer with Windows Vista Ultimate x64. This will allow me to take full advantage of the 4GB of RAM in that machine. Interestingly enough, I can't get the Corsair RAM I bought earlier on in the DP35DP fiasco to work in my computer ... nor can I get it to work in my work computer. I guess the system's just not happy with it. Need to do some research on that. Stabilitywise, though, the Gigabyte EP43-DS3L is leaps and bounds better than the Intel DP35DP it replaced. In case you can't tell, I'm quite happy about that.

Believe it or not, it has been a slow Monday so far. Morning was a little busy, but the afternoon is pretty much dead. I'm working on a database move at the moment, which involves copying just over 3GB of data between servers in different states. Luckily the "source" side of the connection has a 2 megabit upload speed, so the transfer times are at least tolerable.

... at one point i posted that my next car would be a Lexus IS. Yeah ... that didn't happen!

Lots of stuff going on. Good stuff, not-so-good stuff ... been one of those weeks, I guess.

I spent most of the morning on GoToMeetings with customers based in the UK. That's always interesting. Some of the steps I have on my checklist can be completely skipped, as those steps are US-specific, so there's actually less work. The only problem is the time difference: sometimes it is quite difficult to find the time to actually speak to those customers because I've got American customers ringing me all the time.

The river has gone back down now, so my parents have started the cleanup process. Lots of work ... walls, floors, cabinets, everything. Major drag, because it's a lot of work, but there's always a good side -- at least the interior won't be a hodgepodge of '80s and '90s styles anymore

Today has been one of the slowest days I've seen in a while here at the office. Gives me a little time to catch up on some work I fell behind on lately. We're still waiting for a 42U Dell rack to arrive, but once that gets here we're putting it into the (currently vacant) corner office. I'm sick of having servers on peoples' desks.

So ... my parents are staying at my house for a few days. Their basement is completely flooded -- floor to ceiling -- and as of about 3 this afternoon they had 3 inches of water on the ground floor. I was there yesterday to help them move stuff out of the basement and, when the water started coming down the stairs like a waterfall, 22-year-old memories started to resurface. It was probably the smell of the water that triggered the memories ... hard to describe, but it's something like mud, mildew, and a little bit of antifreeze.

My sister and I grabbed the rowboat and moved some stuff out. The river already took the oars so we had to use shovels. Looked silly, but it worked.

Anyway ... not good times.

Apparently, a new Web browser was released while I was on vacation and I didn't even know it. That's probably because it hasn't been released for Mac yet, and I had my MacBook pro with me. Needless to say I installed it on my work and home PCs. So far I like what I've seen: it's fast as all hell, with near-instant startup and page load speeds. Of course, the two machines I've loaded it on are both 3.0GHz Core2Duos with 4GB of RAM, but who's counting?

I've also loaded Internet Explorer 8 on my work machine and, surprisingly enough, it pulls up some pages faster than Google Chrome. I'll be running them side-by-side there for a while.