On Tuesday I did a bad thing: I fried our CD-RW. I didn't do it on purpose, though! I bought the Creative Labs SoundBlaster Audigy sound card on eBay for $50, which is half the price you'd pay at the store for it. It's like one of the best sound cards made. I plugged that baby in, remembering to disable the onboard sound in the CMOS, and when it asked for drivers, I popped in the CD so it got the drivers off that. Then I saw that the ones on the CD were from 2001, so I visited their website and got the latest ones. After installing them, I noticed that there suddenly was an exclamation mark beside the CD-RW drive. Restarting the computer didn't help. I figured the only thing to do was to go on the web and find some drivers for it and copy them over the corrupt ones causing the error. It would have worked fine except what I got from the web actually wasn't drivers, but turned out to be firmware. Okay, drivers are files on the computer that tell your computer all about the equipment and what it can and can't do. Firmware is the actual code inside the equipment that operates it (in the CD-RW's case, it let it open the tray when you press the button, it read and wrote CDs, it made the light blink when it was doing something, etc.). So this misleading thing I downloaded was an update for that. It updated it and I noticed that it didn't look like the normal driver installation, so I ran it again to get a better look and after it started, my computer rebooted from the first time. When it booted up again, the computer couldn't read the CD-RW at all, not even in the CMOS. It basically showed that there was nothing plugged in there. I brainwashed the thing! The tray wouldn't even open when I pushed the button. I had to use a paperclip to manually open it and get the CD out. Other thing's didn't work from it, so I just decided to backup, reformat, and reinstall Windows. I originally installed WinXP on a FAT32 partition, so I needed to reformat it in NTFS anyway.

Yesterday I got paid $380 for the week, so I put that in my account and bought a DVD-RW at Wal-Mart. Now I can burn DVDs as well as CDs! A normal DVD holds 4.35 GB! I took that home and put it in, throwing away the old one. I reformatted and reinstalled Windows and everything else. The sound card works fine now and so does everything else. Actually, the sound card works great. It sounds better than the onboard sound. Now I just need some time to listen to music!

This guy and his mom came over for their appointment for him to get his senior pictures taken by my dad. Our den is now his studio. He took everything out of the closet in here and put the entertainment center in it. Then he painted the walls and ceiling a fresh coat of white, except for half of one of the walls he painted black and a foot-thick strip of the adjacent wall along the top is also black. He will be putting pictures on it and he said the black background will look nice. In front of the closet he set up these metal stands and put a sheet over it for the background. I helped him set up lights with white umbrellas in front of them to soften the brightness, and then he took pictures of the boy. He had a cool leather jacket.

I called Jamie, of course, and we talked a little, but I had to go.

Our neighbors, the Campbells, were throwing a surprise birthday party for Mr. Campbell today. He's 60, but he seriously looks 50. My parents couldn't make it due to the photoshoot, but I took Amy and picked up Andrea from work since she was off and we went there. I didn't know anyone except Mr. and Mrs. Campbell, their daughter, Angela, and Adam's dad, who is also in the "neighborhood". That was alright.

I called Jamie again, since I had to go before. We talked for a while and I made her feel bad on accident, but I got her feeling good later on. We were supposed to chat tonight, but after finishing the stuff in the next paragraph, I got on and she wasn't. :(

At home, I helped my dad move all the stuff on our corner computer desk, so he could take one of the halves away and have everything on the other half. It fits pretty nicely and actually looks better now. I'm able to have my speakers positioned better, too. What a day off. I'm beat, I might as well hit the sack since no one's on. Laters, gators.