Day 340 - 01/26/2008

After putting it off and putting it off, I finally went over to fix mom's computer. Her video card had gone bad and when I tried installing it last weekend, I ran into other issues. I didn't have the time last weekend, so I told her I'd be back. I called over this morning and arranged to come over and then head to the art store to select a new mat for the Jiminy Cricket cell. N came along for the ride (and to play with Sarah) as M had a couple of birthday parties lined up this afternoon/evening.

Not wanting to go back again, I really wanted to get this working before I left so I went straight to work. I was able to get past the initial error regarding the corrupt iosys directory, but whenever I tried to install the drivers for the card, I'd hit a brick wall. After 2-3 hours of working, I was finally able to get the drivers installed after extracting them from the directory that ATI's setup program created (but that Win98 indicated wasn't a Windows application). Although a couple of hours behind schedule (I planned on being done by noon-ish), we headed out to the art store -- but only after I kicked off the disk defrag process. (I really wanted it to be optimized before I left for the day).

After some discussion, we finally agreed on a new set of mats for the cell. The previous ones were cream and really didn't do much for the piece. They pretty much stopped your eyes from focusing on the picture and kept them on the mats. No good. We went with the same frame and a set of sage and black mats (the sage is the primary mat, the black one will serve as the border between the cell and the sage). I'm sure it will look much better than it did before.

After we got back from the store, I fixed the DVD player so they could watch DVDs in the bedroom. It was pretty simple as the cables had been connected to the output vs. the input. Once I switched them (and figured out which buttons needed to be pushed) it worked and N and I were done. I was rewarded for everything I did with a nice bird book. It was quite unexpected, yet also appreciated. I'm sure I'll spend quite a bit of time pouring over the book as I try to increase my knowledge of our fine feathered friends.