Wow, we got hammered with about 2 feet of snow here in the northeast Saturday and Sunday. Poor Pugsley gets very disgruntled when his poopie spots are limited. He likes to have options -- but mama wasn't into breaking her back shoveling too many trenches in this kind of blizzard. I made an eye round in port wine sauce with mashed potatoes for dinner tongiht, but for some reason I'm still starving.

Being snowed in worked out good for me since I had to stay home and fix the issues I've been having with my Dell Notebook that all stemmed from the damn Vundo virus. I basically spent all weekend stripping it down to nothing. First I tried repairing and restoring my hard drive, but still had the same problems. Finally I'd had enough, said F*ck it -- put in my original XP Operating disc, took a deep breath and reformatted the whole mother loving thing, starting over from scratch.

It was wierd when I booted back up and had nothing on my desktop or system tray but an empty recycle bin. I had to reload all of my frequently used programs. Excel, Word, Frontpage, Publisher, Norton, Adobe, my Digital camera software, you name it. Not to mention all the drivers. I also lost my internet connection which took a good 4 hours to figure out how to get back. So after ipconfiging and checking and resetting and troubleshooting my TCP/IP settings and network connections -- I narrowed the problem down to missing drivers that I had to reload after deleting sytem restored drivers because my LAN and WAN autoconfig settings were getting all confused about which network drivers to talk to. Ugg. But Microsoft doesn't make it easy, they lump all your drivers from the boot disc into about 70 folders marked with numbers, so you have to go hunting for the right driver that goes with what you need. Which in this case was my linksys Wireless G network adapter. Who the F would know Dells driver for that is called a Broadcom 440x 10/100 Integrated Controller which was only detectable in the drivers reload disc by the cooresponding #R54631. Can anyone say needle in a f*cking hay stack?? Well, I finally got my LAN connection to work after loading the drivers and utilities but my WAN connection is still down. I'm getting some wierd error that says PC cannot connect with AP. No clue what that means. So I called the linysys 800 number and after being on hold for 1/2 an hour I gave up. I also have a screwy network cable that keeps popping out and an overheating problem -- so for now I have to keep tape on the back of my laptop until I can make it to Staples. The main thing though is that dirty bastard of a virus is gone and I'm back online now without those annoying little winfixer boxes popping up and then kicking me off the net. I never even made it out of my pajamas today. Then, I spent the remainder of my Sunday working on a website for a friend who doesn't care.