Errr, so it’s like Christmas, again. Yeah I don’t get any time off work either, just public holidays and weekends. I’m doing the whole family thing right now at my cousins place, we’re having a few drinks so it’s all good. Not a whole lot is new in the last few days. Been spending a bit of time playing one of my friend’s Nintendo Wii, and doing the odd Christmas shopping.

We have a new TV now, well actually it’s just a 19″ widescreen PC monitor, but because it’s in the longue room and our Home Theatre PC drives everything, it’s a television. I’m really starting to dislike the fact that the tuner card in the HTPC lacks composite inputs, especially since the PC monitor only accepts VGA and DVI.

My cousin just got a brand new 22″ widescreen for his PC, it’s a BenQ with 5ms response, FEAR looks nice. I wanted to burn a whole bunch of new games to bring down with me however it seems my main machine (server) is full of filesystem errors. My 200GB hard drive is now no longer showing up in Windows, it looks like I’m going to need to rebuild the partition table. To rub salt in the wound we lost our ADSL Modem/Router yesterday, so we have no wireless now. A huge storm came through and a nasty surge took it out, as well as our 8 port switch, so we’re running a skeleton network with a backup modem and no wireless, which is frustrating to say the least.

I’ll have a crack at returning the modem to Belkin for warranty but if it doesn’t work out then I’m out of pocket about $300, since this router has support for two VOIP lines plus PSTN fallover. Note to self, buy a better surge board!