Today my dad gave me this neato little pen looking thing that connects through USB and has 30MB of space. What a neato little toy. I used my new toy to transfer my pictures from my laptop to a properly functioning computer. Here are my pictures from Vegas.

My computer doesn't like me.

It all started when the wireless on my laptop started tweaking out and not connecting to the internet properly. Then while trying to troubleshoot what was wrong with my network connection, I decided that I would upgrade from Windows 2000 to XP. In the middle of the upgrade the hard drive died. I then had to go through all these diagnostic thingamajoos to see if there was a workaround, but alas, there wasn't. That was after about 6 hours of having to restart the installation before the whole thing completely died. Luckily for some odd reason, this 3 year old computer was still on warranty. I called up Dell and they promptly sent me a replacement. So now once the new hard drive had arrived, I tried to install XP once again. I took out all of my handy CD's to reinstall all of my drivers, and whadya know, they're not compatible with XP. I tried installing the drivers that I got from online for my network cards so that I could at least get online to download everything else. After about 2 hours of trying to install the driver that kept failing, the wireless started working....kind of. Then I ended right back where I started with the bad connections. I decided that I would try to connect directly rather than through wireless, and tried to install the driver to my network card. AGAIN, nothing works. Argh. I hate XP.

I have already downloaded all of my pictures from Vegas and my weekend onto this computer and due to the lack of network connections, I can't upload them. They'll be up eventually though as I had promised before as soon as my computer and OS start working with me.

Started my first day of work at my new job today. Wahoo! It was waay cool and a neato environment. Oh yeah, did I ever say where I was working? If you haven't figured it out by now from the picture, I work for Google owners of Blogger. How cool is that? When you walk into Google there are big ole' balls bouncing everywhere, lava lamps, and massage chairs in the lounges. There is free food galore in the fully stocked snack rooms and free gourmet lunches. Not only that, but the people are very friendly and cool. I've always wanted a job where I would love the company that I work for and love what I do. And whaddya know...I got it.

Since I was starting work this week, I went on a nice relaxing trip up to Sonoma County with a few friends for the weekend. We rented a cabin for the 14 of us...a cabin that only had one usable bathroom and a downstairs bedroom that strongly resembled something from Blair Witch or The Ring. Needless to say, that was quite interesting, especially when we ran out of toilet paper. We did some hiking in the hills and swimming in the Russian River. Riding the current down the river was so fun, but I was so tired after racing to swim against the current back to our spot on the bank. I finally learned how to play poker and was reminded once again what a terrible liar I am. We visited the Korbel Vineyards to take a tour of the winery and of course...did some wine tasting. On the way home, we stopped in Berkeley to have dinner and take a stroll down Telegraph.

And here I am now relaxing at home after a long day at work...life is good.