It is day 1 of the NBA Western Conference Finals. It will be fun to see how the fouling Spurs fare against MVP Kobe and his Lakers.
The Eastern Conference finals seem to be a Home-winner affair. The Celtics have been undefeated at home so far in the post season. Do the Pistons have it in them to defeat the Celtics at home?
The Home computer had a major issue. It wouldn't boot up sometimes. I thought I must accidentally put it to sleep without realizing that there is no way for it wake up since I have a wireless keyboard and mouse.
After opening it up again today, I found that pressing the power button switches everything ON and the whole system turns off itself in about a second. The only indication that something is amiss on the mother-board was an orange light (CR12J2) next to the blue power light. Later after some searching I realized that I did not seat the memory correctly. (I think it must have been displaced because I have been fiddling around with the case wiring on the mother board). Removing the memory and putting it back in did the trick. Now my new baby is back up again to its full glory. A Vista User experience rating of 5.3 (not bad huh!)
Finally, all the components were in place and the couple things that were stopping me from giving the final touches were bought in the nearby Fry's and its all done.
I also ordered a Dell SP2208WFP 22 inch monitor and got it shipped yesterday and the machine is finally up to its full glory.
Installing software is the only bit that is pending. Hopefully this weekend would provide me with an opportunity to finish it off and also I need to find a good location for my home-office.
More deals allowed me to buy a few more things:
Am still not sure about the cabinet and the monitor. I should be settling on something soon.
Preparing taxes every year is an arduous task. Last year it was a friendly neighborhood H&R Block that helped. This year, the rate they decided to charge me was as much as $180. That was a little too expensive and I decided to try my hand at preparing taxes myself using the TurboTax software. I purchased TurboTax Deluxe and was simply amazed at how much information it could obtain with just my SSN and Employer's ID. It pretty much filled everything for me. The only confusion still lurking on my mind is the relocation expenditure part. Should I fill the 3903 form or not. Tax advice is expensive to come by and every friend I spoke to came up with a different suggestion so far. Hope that I do the right thing.
I managed to find a deal and buy the 8600GT on newegg. I also managed to buy the 4GB RAM from Fry's.
Now the confusing part is whether to go for the dual or quad core processor. The dual core 3GHz processor is more expensive than the quad core. Might end up buying the quad core processor.
I decided on building my new home PC. The first step was to decide on what I wanted. Here are the things that I finalized on:
Many thanks to Subodh and Ashok who helped me nail this configuration.
I took the first step towards achieving my goal and I got a used nForce 680i SLI Intel motherboard. I hope that it is not much of a compromise. Maybe, I can use the money saved on getting more accessories.
Now the challenge is to get the rest of the stuff in-place and build that PC.
One of my rare cooking experiments happened yesterday. I tried my hand at preparing Taro root fry. It is a simple dish to prepare, but there were other factors that had to be overcome, particularly because the last time I prepared it, it turned out to be a disaster (well, not exactly, but my wife didn't like it). For starters, the recipe from Shyamala Ramanathan-Edwards was of great help.
The key in preparing Taro-root is to boil it long enough so that it is cooked but not longer as it can get sticky. I think I overdid the boiling bit a little but managed it somehow.
The "dry batter" mix specified in the above recipe turned out to be the killer. I managed to get the ingredients and the preparation part right and when I had started frying, my wife returned home from work. The smell of the fry seemed to have attracted her taste buds and she was ready to try it this time. It turned out to be crispy and a little hard and it tasted great. My wife was impressed and I can eat more of one of my all time favorite veggies.
Came across this really strange story. A pregnant man! Whats happening to this world? Story credit Prem Panicker.
I did this crazy thing of installing a new version of Cisco VPN client on my laptop without un-installing the previous version. Result: DISASTER. Sleepless night.
The VPN client that ultimately resulted from my stupidity was un-usable. So I tried doing the next best thing, un-install. The VPN client wouldn't uninstall as it was searching for a different installer than the version that was installed.
I had no other option but to delete the Cisco VPN installed folder and muck around with the registry to try and remove all entries and hope the installer would let me install the new version. But, no such luck.
Finally I stumbled upon this Windows Installer CleanUp Utility that helped make the VPN installer think that no previous version of Cisco VPN existed on my machine and allowed me to install the version I wanted.
This is making it much easier to write onto the blog. Quite a nice tool compared to the unfriendly WYSIWIG editor that blogger has on their site.
Check it out here
