I think I can safely say that my sense of taste has fully (or at least close enough to fully) returned. Sense of saltiness and bitterness were the first to recover. The ability to taste sweetness was last and was a long time in coming.

Back in January, I wrote "I'll eat all those vile-tasting 'healthy' foods that I generally avoid." Ironically I think I found myself doing the opposite. Desperate to taste again, I continued to eat junk food, more than normal. I couldn't taste it and I think deep down each one was a hopeful "Maybe this time...." I managed to reverse what up until January had been a slow but steady weight loss, gaining about 7 pounds. Fortunately everything has settled again and I'm on track for losing that weight again. Plus I find it hard to watch the movie 300 and not feel inspired to get in better shape.

New drive errors prompted me to finally face the fact that my dying motherboard was not reliable. Sadly, it's a non-standard Dell board in a non-standard Dell case, meaning I had to replace both board and case at the same time. I decided to retain my existing socket 478 P4 and let me tell you that it is not easy to find a 478 board these days. I ended up going with a mini-ATX Biostar board and I come to find out that my 1 GB of RAM was comprised of four 256 sticks. Mini-ATX boards only have 2 memory slots, grr. More money spent on getting a single GB stick. Also had to get a new heat sink & fan for the CPU, since Dell's was not compatible.

When the Biostar board arrives, it's Dead On Arrival, which is what I feared. Yeah, it was inexpensive, and the reason seems to be that these Biostar motherboards often arrive DOA. It was not unexpected, I was simply hoping it wouldn't be the case. Now I have to ship it back for a replacement and wait even more time for my main machine to be back up and running.

In addition, the new mid-tower case I ordered came with all eight posts that attach the front panel cleanly snapped off. Fortunately NewEgg gave me a good discount on it and I was easily able to epoxy them back on.

A lot of frustration and depression over the whole situation. Fortunately I was able to recover all of my data off the drive that went haywire.

Okay, for the 2 of you who visit this site, you undoubtedly realized that the site was down for quite a while. Pains of switching hosts, sadly. Things seem to be up and running now, so everyone's happy.

So the jackasses in Congress decided that in order to save a bit of energy, they'd screw with the civilized world and extend the fraud that is Daylight Saving Time a couple of months. Of course, there's no definitive evidence that any energy is saved at all, but why let logic and reason interfere with good legislating! In the meantime, they fuck things up because in the past 25 years quite a few things have been automated and the switch to DST being one of them.

Now I appreciate having more daylight in the evening, I do. If it was up to me, I'd stay on DST 12 months a year. At least then we wouldn't be required to do this ridiculous shift twice a year. Let's just face facts: sometimes it is dark outside. All the shuffling of clocks in the world isn't going to change that.