So I fried my mobo the other day. Yeah, well, actually my cousin fried it. I heard the crackling discharge of static from his finger to my keyboard from clear across the room, and my ensuing wail of rage and despair was even louder. Several random lockups and a piece-by-piece component check later and I determined that it was curtains for my old Gigabyte. So I'm a couple hundred dollars poorer, and somewhere a Fry's employee is throwing my cash up in the air, cackling "Mine! It's all mine!!!" (Well, maybe not.)

Picked up an Abit AN7, with the NForce 2 chipset (with a discount for damaged packaging), and a new 2800 XP to go in it. Nothing too high-end. Replaced the fan on my Thermaltake because the old one was getting squeaky, blew the dust out of my case, and proceeded to take the opportunity to completely wipe and reinstall Debian testing. I love having new hardware, even if I notice no difference whatsoever. Next up: a vid-card upgrade (though I'm not going to get too wild and out of control there; I like to keep my development system fairly low-key, and close to the average system specs I expect my game to run at; if it runs well there, it should run well just about anywhere.)

I love three day weekends; even though I won't be able to escape Phoenix for Labor Day, it'll still be nice to have Monday off and get some stuff taken care of. Helping a friend lay new tile in his bathroom, helping another friend string electrical hookups to his new shed. And, hey, I might even be able to put in a few extra hours on Golem. Bonus.