Nemesis Destiny: The Blog of Ron Bes

I'm back, baby

This marks the return of the blog. Things are pretty barebones right now, but I'm grateful to Luke for his efforts, especially considering I don't pay him (not for THIS service anyway *wink-wink* ).

The old blog can still be accessed via this link, if anyone cares. I haven't decided if I'm going to move everything over or just leave it this way. I guess it depends on how much of the old one doesn't work anymore and how ambitious I'm feeling...

So, where did I leave off... oh yes, my computer's hard drive exploded and I was in the middle of picking up the proverbial pieces. Unfortunately, the drive was not salvageable - all data was considered a write-off. I had sent it to CBL Data Recovery, but despite their best efforts my data has been lost to digital oblivion.

This may have been a blessing in disguise for several reasons: First, it lit a new fire under my ass to continue my writing. Second, I'm now wiser and will be a backup advocate from now on. Third, I didn't have to pay CBL the $1,750 they were going to charge had the proceedure recovered even one kilobyte of usable data. Thank goodness for their "no data, no charge" motto (in fact, that's why I chose them).

So anyway, I've got a new system now. That was one of the last things I did on my old computer before it went. It was the very next day that things got bad. The new system is a beast-and-a-half:

AMD Athlon XP 2500+ (overclocked at 3200+)
ASUS A7N8X Deluxe
1024MB (2 x 512MB) OCZ CL2 DDR400 RAM (with flashy copper heat spreaders)
ASUS V9560 Video Suite GeForce FX 5600 128MB graphics card
2 x 36GB Western Digital "Raptor" 10,000rpm SATA hard drives, hardware RAID-0
LG CD-RW / DVD-ROM Combo Drive 52x24x52x16 (Black)
Antec Sonata "Piano Black" case with Antec TruePower Quiet 380W PSU
Vantec Aeroflow Heatsink/Fan
Samsung SyncMaster 955DynaFlat 19" CRT (Black)
Logitech Mx500 mouse & Elite keyboard (Black & Silver)
Altec Lansing 621CN 143W 3 piece speakers (have not arrived yet - on back order)

All is not lost. I'm rebuilding the stuff I had from internet downloads, partial backups I made, files I sent to others, and other miscellaneous sources. This time there are some significant changes in my software structure. Namely, besides my cracked, pirated copy of WinXP (I ran Win2k before), everything is freeware. No more shitty MS Word, now I use OpenOffice. No more gay Outlook, now it's Mozilla Mail. Internet Explorer only where absolutely, positively necessary (Windows update, some 3rd party junk); Mozilla handles the rest.