I won't even bother saying that my entries over the next few days will be sporadic ones. In two years of working on this site I've learned one thing: the moment I say that there will be a few days of sporadic entries, I find myself churning out over a thousand words a day, practically in spite of myself.

We've begun the massive computer upgrade. Tonight, the equivalent of an opening round: the new hard drives are being installed in the server. This additional space is intended to provide a central access point for our mp3 files, which currently reside on my d: drive. As soon as the RAID array is functional, I'll move the files off of my computer, which will completely free up d: for phase two of the upgrade.

Phase two: back up all of my critical files onto my d: drive in preparation for upgrading my computer. My new RAM, CPU, motherboard, and video card are currently sitting in the kitchen. We await the arrival of my new case and power supply, which we expect to come in tomorrow.

Jeff will then move other sundry items like my two CD drives (regular and burner) and my hard drive to the new computer. Since I'm running win2k, such a mass of changes virtually requires a wipe and reinstall. Thus, c: will have to be cleaned off and rebuilt. Not really one of my favorite things to do, but I will be seeing such an enormous performance boost from this upgrade that I don't dare complain.

Normally, I'd say that I won't be around to post entries while this is going on, but let's be honest—I'm going to sit in front of a computer for all these hours, working on things that give me a lot of time to think, and you really think that I'm not going to come up with something to say?

On the other hand, perhaps I should say to expect a really long-winded entry tomorrow night.

Either way, I'm looking forward to a computer that doesn't complain when I try to run complex graphics filters. It's been at least 2 years (possibly three?) since we upgraded my computer, and the differences will be immediate, I'm sure.

Oh, I should also mention that there's this little Phase Three that I get to handle…otherwise known as the days and weeks it will take to go through our CD collection, one CD at a time, and rip them to mp3 so that we'll have access to all of them on the house server.

(Don't ask how many CDs. Just don't. I'll fling nasty things at you.)

It's lousy, tedious work if you can get it, but it's one of those things that you know you'll appreciate when they're done, so you just do it to get it over with. Having a house that's wired for ethernet is quite nice sometimes.