Well. The operation was successful. I'm now on XP.

Yeah. So today when I came home from work I went upstairs and turned off my computer and unplugged everything and opened it up and proceeded to put my new hard drive in my computer and put windows XP on it. It mostly seems to have worked.

In more detail:
First I opened it up.
Then I noticed there's really only one rack space for a hard drive in the thing because it's RETARDED.
Then I got Eli to look at it and he mostly agreed.
So I decided I was going to just leave the machine open and slave my old hard drive until I moved everything over. Whee.

I put in the new hard drive and installed win2k. It took, literally, almost 2 hours to format the freaking drive and install the OS. In the time it took, I read 20 pages of a book, went out to Sunset Bowl to play 4 games of DDR, shopped at Safeway for a bit, and reorganized most of my board games downstairs.

Win2k installed around 11pm; then I made it upgrade to XP. That took until midnight.

Fortunately, it was trivial to just attach the old hard drive to the slave IDE plug and reboot the machine, and BLAM, there's my old hard drive with all my stuff on it; I've been copying things over.

Priorities being what they are, I installed Puzzle Pirates pretty quickly. It was running REALLY choppy, and I was really frustrated, and then I downloaded a new driver for my graphics card, and whee! everything's all good.

I also seem to have my AIM contact list intact in Trillian, but not ICQ, so if you're someone I talk to in ICQ instead of AIM (I can't really think of anyone offhand besides Nykkel and Farren and sometimes DJ), don't be surprised if you get a "deanna's adding you to her list" thingy, although you shouldn't anyway because it's Trillian.

Arrr. So, it'll be neat to figure out over the next few days which thingies I have to reinstall and all...

This post is about baseball :(

Tug McGraw, 1944-2004

Yeah, some of you are going "who?" But see, when I was a kid, he was one of the best pitchers on the Phillies staff. And he struck out the last guy in the 1980 World Series and made it so it was impossible to hear anything but "We Are The Champions" on Philadelphia radio stations for a month or two. My mom was a really, really, really big fan of his, because she had actually followed the Mets in the late 60's and early 70's AND the Phillies in the late 70's. (Usually I ignore a lot of email from her, but this one said "I think you should read this - a great pitcher died today.")

Aside from that bad news, Paul Molitor and Dennis Eckersley are in the Hall of Fame 2004 class. I feel awful for some of the other guys on the ballot who still haven't gotten in, particularly Ryne Sandberg. Bruce Sutter should also totally be in there. Goose Gossage, too, I think. And then all the Yankees people are going to start on Don Mattingly, of course.

I still think it's cool that we (Mariners) will have a Hall of Famer as our hitting coach this year, though.

Hey, and in OTHER good news, Jeff Cirillo is letting the Mariners trade him to San Diego!!!! I think it'll actually work out really well for him. And he'll get to come back and play here a bit too, as SD is our "natural enemy" city or whatever.