My stomach is hurting, and I'm not sure why, but I suspect it's because I ate some under-cooked sausages. I'm also in one of those malaise states. Don't wanna play games, watch movies, read, or do anything, and yet I want to do something.

The other night I was testing something that claimed to defeat the StarForce copyprotection system. It ended up rendering my WinXP system completely unbootable, so I had to reinstall the OS and all my applications. It took me longer than usual because I also figured now might be a good time to flash my BIOS and to clean up the drive a bit.

Flashing the BIOS didn't work (my BIOS is pretty fucked up, and I might write to Chaintech for some tech support when my laziness subsides), and no matter how I tried accessing my drive (WinXP installation disk recovery console, various DOS boot CDs with NTFS support, etc.), I kept getting "access denied" error messages when I tried to delete the files I wanted deleted. I think I downloaded and burned 4 or 5 new bootable CDs trying to do the above, all for not.

I'm considering doing a bit of fictional writing, though in a very structured rule based way, and I'm a bit too lazy to actually play via my own rules. I don't know if that project will ever see the light of day.

Oh yeah, and I'm also supposed to build another computer for my brother. Apparently his is acting up again in ways that do not seem easily repairable. The mouse will randomly not function on certain boot-ups. WinXP install CD reports read errors when trying to install from either one of his optical drives. Adding another harddrive renders the system non-bootable (even when I specify via the BIOS the correct drive to boot from), etc. So I'm just gonna build a new one, and maybe turn his old one into a Linux box or something.

Watch me not do any of that today.

Oh yeah, and it's my mom's birthday today.