I've decided I'm going to post to this a lot more often. I realize I say that nearly every post any more but this time there's really no excuse. I can't believe I haven't posted since February.

I finished out the project at the hospital in March. If I'm lucky I will never have to through something like that again. For two weeks straight I worked twelve hour shifts two or three of those days were overnight (7pm to 7am). Me and 12 hours over night apparently don't go together. It took me a few days before I finally put tin foil up over the windows. By then I was only getting a few hours of sleep a night (or day). I really really wasn't doing too good. Then I finally got switched to day shift. Which was much better of course. I was still miserable from all the sleep I had missed.

On the bright side I did rather enjoy really did enjoy the amount of money 70+ hours a week provides.

After the project I got renewed at the same hospital. I stayed and worked there for a couple weeks cleaning up post-project. The older guy had left, gone back home to southern California. After handling tickets for a few weeks I was then sent to another hospital, this one a bit further away then the one I was at for the project.

I obviously wasn't enjoying myself too much but I thought I was at least getting the job done. Apparently the people in charge didn't agree. At the end of may they decided to not extend my contract. What few contractors there were left were getting renewed a month at a time up until then. Between mid-March and late May anyway.

So I have now been unemployed for one month. By some coincidence June 1st was a Monday so I have actually been unemployed for a month. Unfortunately I haven't accomplished nearly what I thought I would given the opportunity to not be stuck at work.

It was a remarkably mild June where I am: the temps hovered between 70 and 80 when it's normally reach the high 90s and 100s. I tried to exercise as much as I could, by which I mean walk a couple miles every day or every other day. What I should have really been doing is some kind of calisthenics. Stretches and push-ups and whatever. It usually doesn't take all that long for me to get a new job, some how I thought this would be similar. Obviously a silly notion.

I was originally going to buy a "gaming laptop" for several thousand dollars. I have also been thinking about building myself a new desktop.

My actual desktop has been sitting near my desk for months now ever since it had apparently ceased to function. It started blue screen for no apparent reason and then it wouldn't accept any keyboard input no matter what I did to it. So it's just been collecting dust.

I switched over to my rapidly aging laptop in that time. I still had my Windows Home Server to remote desktop into anyway. Between the laptop and the WHS I managed to get everything I need to get done done. I just wasn't able to play any games really. That was the only thing to be hung up on.

I decided to upgrade the capacity of my WHS: to go from 500Gigsx4 to 500gigsX2 and 1TBX2. I also ordered a new backplane for my desktop similar to the one already in my WHS. I just had to run my hard drive utility on the two 1TB drives before using them though unfortunately. I say unfortunately because each drive took more than 100 hours to finish. The utility is called SpinRite. A great utility for verifying new drives and fixing bad ones but waiting 100 hours for it to finish is just horrible.

I wasn't doing both drives at once either. It took almost two weeks for both drives to finish on the spinrite. But now they are both finished, and my desktop is back up and running. To put it mildly I have a lot of storage now.

I now have the RC1 of Windows 7 running on my main laptop, my netbook (an AcerOne) and my main desktop. The desktop would be on the x64 version. Sure there's still some glitches here and there but I still like it. Even if I am still trying to get accustomed to it.

RC1 runs remarkably well on the netbook actually. The netbook has 1Gig of memory, which doesn't hurt. I think I need to learn a little more about how to optimize the performance a little more.

I had backed up my installation of Steam from way-back-when (by which I mean last January/February) so it was easy to get that back up and going with all my games. A few of them still had to finish downloading but over-all it was a remarkably fast way to back up and running with steam and a large potion of my games. Now all I need is Oblivion and/or Fallout 3 install back on it.

Some how I had expected I would be working on my virtual machine various projects during this time but haven't really worked on it at all. Before losing my job I had developed this rather extensive batch file for automating making new VMs and I was planning on porting this to windows script host. I even bought a VBScript book. Alas I haven't even worked on the batch file nor the planned port. I think I have booted up the VM once or twice but nothing really extensive or obsessive like usual.

I'm sure I could write more but I'll save that later or tomorrow.