“So, Karel, what’s been going on in your life lately?”

• Saturday was a nice big goof-off day, culminating in the premiere of InuYasha on Cartoon Network. Not too shabby, really, but I like most of the stuff from the creator of Ranma 1/2. I couldn’t tell you what Sunday was like, I don’t remember. It must not have been terribly interesting.
  
• Yesterday was a day of guests. Ben and John came over early in the afternoon for hours and hours of Diablo II gaming as well as a short Doom Legacy fragfest. Nothing like nostalgic gaming, right down to the “why won’t Doom effing network properly?” Brought back memories, I tell ya. A few hours after they left, the Bourgos came over. We convinced Amy (Michael needed none) to play Age of Empires instead of Diablo, since I’d already had more than my fill over the weekend. A great time was had by all. For the record, Amy and Michael won thanks to her early wonder completion and a flotilla of Michael’s Viking longboats to protect said wonder. My Korean turtle ships didn’t stand a chance, so I spent the 400 year countdown beating the living crap out of my Japanese neighbors. Yes, I’m a big wuss.
  
• The kids start school again tomorrow, so Wendi’s got them out shopping and doing other preparatory activities.
  
• Zero crashed. Hard. As I was getting ready to type up a really big Thoughts entry. (I’ve been shamefully neglecting that category since about, oh, this time last year.) Turns out that the loud whining noise coming from her tower is the sound of a hard drive on its last bearings. As I type this, data is being transferred to another computer in anticipation of replacing the hard drives in Zero and starting over again. Wheee. I wasn’t planning to do another Linux From Scratch build quite so soon, but life is often that way… unplanned situations that don’t bear waiting.
  
• On a related note, the “Current Music” feature will be missing until Zero is fully operational and trustworthy once more. Turns out that if XMMS isn’t running on Zero, the “Current Music” code stalls and prevents the loading of the rest of this site. Eep! I’ll see about coming up with some sort of better way of showing off my music collection.