NASA – Space Shuttle

Space Shuttle Discovery made it’s return to night flight this evening in a spectacular launch from KSC. If you’ve never seen a launch, check out the video at the link above. While it’s not quite like being there, it’s still pretty impressive. I only wish I could’ve been outside at launch time. The weather was clear enough to have seen it.

It’s been a gloomy, rainy Sunday. I tried to stave off boredom this morning by finally completing yet another home improvement project, namely adding a proper cable outlet for the cable modem in the computer room. After that, I thought I might try out the final version of Windows Vista. As I wrote that last sentence, I looked back at the other computer to see the famous Blue Screen of Death. Apparently, the upgrade didn’t go so well. hmmm… Well, looks like I’ve got some troubleshooting to do. Thankfully I made a backup of my hard drive before I started this! 🙂

update: Phew… As it turns out, it was just a driver issue. One nice feature of Vista is that if something doesn’t work out during the first reboot, you can select an option to boot your previous OS and it will be restored to the pre-upgrade state. Nice! The down side is that you have to go through the whole process all over again.

update 2: So long Vista, I barely knew ye! Well, after playing around with Vista for a couple of days, I decided to revert back to Windows XP SP2. As it turns out, my motherboard is based on NVidia’s NForce2 series chipset and while there is a basic level of driver support for it, NVidia has decided not to do any further driver development for that platform. As this is my gaming box, and I can’t live without some features like the 5.1 channel sound, Vista had to go. Instead, I’ll probably be loading it on my workstation at the office. So for any of you considering doing the upgrade, make an inventory of your hardware and research the driver support before you make the plunge!