Pass / Fail

It's been a mixed week of success and failure. After stalling for weeks I finally got around to snaking the kitchen sink drain. It's been draining very slowly for a couple months. I hate working with plumbing -- it's messy when things go well and so much worse when they don't. And when you're done there's always the inevitable leak. This time the trap and pipe into the well came out easily enough. The snake went in about eight feet before hitting an obstruction (maybe the right turn under the basement floor). I felt a few blockages before the snake was fully played out, 25 feet. I believe that got it out to the four inch drain for the toilets. The snake was getting goopier and goopier as I was stuffing it back into the spinner. The business end was positively ugly -- black and greasy (where does all that black come from?). Reassembling the plumbing was fast, but just running water from the tap showed a leak. I tore it apart and put it back together with much more attention to detail, something I was sloppy about the first time. This time, no leaks. For the the real test is filling the sink and draining it. Boy! does the water go down quickly when the line is clear. Success!

I mentioned to Fran that I'd seen a copy of the Microsoft Flight Simulator on sale at Best Buy for $20. I've always liked the game (or whatever) and was thinking of getting a copy. She was cool with it. Examining the package it became apparent that my motherboard-based video support probably wouldn't cover the game's minimum requirements, so I asked for and got approval for a video card. I picked up one which easily met the requirements and wasn't expensive. It's installation was going swimmingly well until the driver installation. The machine was busy for about 20 minutes before showing a window that the installation had failed with the comment the machine was unchanged. I allowed the machine to reboot and got a black screen. Hmm. Something changed. Shut down, pull power, pull the new card, plug in, reboot. Now the machine tells me it found new hardware (the on-board video support) and was installing the drivers, which went well. I left it like that for the night. Sunday I tried the installation again, following all the instructions as before. On boot up with the new card I saw the BIOS screen and the little animation which Vista shows before displaying the User Account choice screen. That animation was the last thing I saw. I heard the audio alert associated with the UA screen but was again looking at black. I have two things I want to try before calling the card's tech support line, but for the moment... Fail.