For those of you who bother to read these, hello once again. For those of you who don't know and have been wondering why I seemingly fell off the face of the earth, my computer suffered a severe crash back in September of last year and wouldn't boot up. After talking with some tech-savvy friends of mine, we thought that a registry file had become corrupted and was preventing it from booting. Simple fix; just pop in the CD-ROM with Windows on it and replace the bad file, right? Well it seems that my computers did not come with such a disk, and since my version of Windows (winXP Media Center Edition) was considered OEM by Microsoft, they wouldn't give me the time of day let alone a disk, and I'd had the computer roughly a year when the crash happened so I didn't even bother trying to contact Sony. Instead, I went with a friend's plan to send me a CD with Windows on it. I figure a few days' to a couple weeks' wait is no big deal, but it turns out the mail route between here and my friend's place is quite unreliable, as it takes several tries and a couple months before the disk makes it, and even then it's only after he sends it priority and takes out insurance on it. So I finally get the disk and think this whole ordeal's finally over, right? Wrong. Turns out the computer's in even worse shape than originally thought, since it won't boot from the disk and is now making a clicking sound on startup which I come to learn indicates that the hard drive is on the brink of a head crash, which of course dashes any hopes I had of recovering data from it. I then am forced to get a whole new hard drive with my tax returns, which I manage to snag for $72. I then get windows installed, only to find that it's winXP Professional Edition, not XP Media Center Edition, and it has some drivers missing, namely the modem and audio drivers, plus my wireless network in my home's also acting up! So I get a flash drive and download the drivers and reset my router & everything's fine, right? Wrong again! Seems I still can't get online on the wireless for some reason, and the dialup is insanely unstable. I put up with this for a couple weeks, then finally today I figure out that what was happening with the wireless is that the Windows networking software was conflicting with the network adaptor's software over the connection, basically like two people trying to go down a narrow hallway at the same time; not gonna happen. I finally get that sorted out and now I'm finally fully back online. The past few months haven't been all bad news though; I got a job unloading trucks at the local Wal-Mart back in October, and I've been losing an insane amount of weight just from working there. I went from 290+ pounds when I started to 243 pounds as of this posting, and from a XXL 50" waistband to an XL 43" waistband. All this just from hefting and lugging around boxes, no fancy diets or pills or any of that stuff. I'm hoping to get down to around 200 pounds or so within the year. I've also found and set up a working VHS player in my room, so now I can watch both my DVD's and my old VHS tapes. I also used my tax returns to buy a PS2 and got Sly 3: Honor Among Thieves as my first game, which I've already beaten the story mode on. Well, that's all for now, see you all later and take care.