stood outside for 45 minutes, but no confirmed leonid sightings. too much light pollution here in LA, i'm sure. ah well, back to bed...
@3:56:48 AM

i finally made the move to winXP at home last sunday. i got fed up with the constant instability of win98. the upgrade was fairly smooth, with the exception of an annoying application blocking issue.

i used to use an application called "SecuRemote" from Firewall-1 to connect to the network of a company i used to work for. i uninstalled that application 2 years ago when i left that company. winXP found some remnants of that application lying around my system, so i had to find the various needles in the haystack so xp could do its thing. not sure why it couldn't just say "want us to nuke this for you?"... instead, i had to spend 3 hours hunting for registry keys and random files.

after that, the upgrade went smoothly. and my system came up nice and snappily after the 90 minute upgrade was complete. but my dsl connection didn't work. nor did my dial-up connection. my nic and modem seemed to be fine by the xp diagnostics. five days, three calls to verizon tech support, and two hours of googling at work later, my home dsl connection is working again. turned out that the 3com nic i have (3C905C-TX) says that it works ok when you upgrade from 98 to xp, but you really have to install a new driver from 3com to get it to work properly.

seems like everything's fully operational again. xp seems pretty cool. love the snappy boot ups. and launchcast plays without stutters, something 98 wasn't able to do on my system for the past several months. will be kicking the tires on xp's photos features over the next few days.
@10:50:43 PM