Monday, July 12, 2004

Nikon Coolscan III Slide Scanner. Yeah, so my weekend starts out pretty good. Got our grub on at the K0rea H0use friday night, where the Sushi Guy always hooks us up with some appetizer (RAAAAWWW FISH), then watched 'Road to Perdition' courtesy of Netflix. The movie sucked.

I guess the best compliment I can give the movie was that it was faithful to the original source.

..which isn't saying much, because the graphic novel that it was based on sucked too. I bought it shortly after Sam Mendes (the director) announced that he was adapting it for the big screen. After reading it, I thought that all the high profile talent involved would do a better job with it.

Later on Friday night, I fired up the ol' PC and played some more Medieval: Total War. I conquered some more of Europe and called it a night. Saturday, I was locked in various bidding wars on eBay for a decent slide film scanner. I was looking at the older Minolta Dual Scan series, but the prices were getting a little out of hand. I put one final bid on a Nikon Coolscan III w/Digital ICE and then we left to go check out Em's brother's new Scion Tc.

First off, the Scion Tc is the new hotness. You really couldn't want more in a two door compact in terms of value, options and overall satisfaction. It's definately one cool car that has European lines on the outside and Tokyo glitter on the inside. Literally, glitter, because Frank had some techno remix of A-Ha's Take on Me that was befitting of a man his stature and height.

Afterwards, I found out that I won the scanner. The only downside is that it's an older model with a SCSCI-2 interface. I work with SCSI devices here at work, but when you're trying to backtrack into the world of Scanners/SCSCI-2/Fast-SCSI/UltraSCSI/ULVD/Ultra360--i.e. The SCSI Wilderness, you better read up on it.

I spent the good part of the night trying to find a compatible SCSI PCI card that would work with the Coolscan. After a few hours, I finally decided to load up some Medieval : Total War and kick some Mongol ass. That's when my f**** Windows XP installation crashed.

The System Restore status meter got bogged down at about 75-80%, probably on some corrupted Windows files. Tried to do an install with my USB External CD-RW to rebuild my installation, but that wasn't happening either. Since my Internal DVD/CD-RW drive was busted for months, I had no way of getting to a Windows Install before the bootable IDE partition was loaded.

I called Wally up at two in the morning because I knew he was probably up and asked If I could borrow his second Internal CD-RW drive, which he did.

I spent all Sunday backing up my data and re-installing XP. During this time, Emily was doing the laundry when I hear a:

"Not so good." I turn around and she pulls my cell phone out of the washer.

Score: Life 2, Hza 0.

So, we go up to the Bestus Buy to buy a new Cell phone since my washed one had condensation between the laminates on the screen and the backlight flickers. Bestus decided to stock only the 200+ dollar phones with rebates for new customers only. I guess the Consortium of Old White Men Who Rule the World convened for the weekend and decided that screwing me over was of the utmost priority.

Actually, it wasn't too bad since Frank was driving to get his new car (in turn, taking his trade-in in) got into a car accident.

Everything is back to normal now, but I'm waiting with excitement on the next foul up to happen to me.
posted by HZA | 2:41 PM | email | archive