TGI.. Thursday?

So at work my office is on the third and top floor of the building--my window overlooks the parking lot, but between here and there are some oak and pine trees that occasionally play host to birds of various types. Usually blue jays, frequently woodpeckers, now and then crows or robins or whatever happens to be passing through the area. Yesterday I was sitting here at work, actually taking some pictures of a couple red-bellied woodpeckers on the trees, when all of a sudden a whole flock of birds smashes into the window. The side of the building is all glass panels, so it reflects the trees and the occasional bird gets confused and whacks into the glass. But that was the first time I'd seen a whole flock hit, and they hit pretty hard--hard enough that there were feathers drifting around afterwards, and hard enough to kill a few of them. Went downstairs later in the day and saw two dead cedar waxwings on the ground. And that makes it doubly sad, because those are such beautiful birds and I hardly ever see them around to begin with. It was neat to get a close look at them, but I'd have preferred it if they hadn't been dead. So anyway, that was a bit sad.

Went home yesterday and finally fired up the new PC, but it was a bit of a scare. It came up and I went into the BIOS to configure stuff, and it suddenly shut itself back down. Uh-oh, I think. Tried again a few more times, same result every time--it would come on for maybe 30 seconds or a minute, and then shut itself down. Hoping something wasn't fried out of the box (though not actually fearful of that, since I've been building PCs for years and almost never had a component be bad or go bad right away), I took to the Internet and found others reporting similar symptoms and tracing it back to the CPU heatsink/fan. Sure enough, I hadn't gotten it seated properly, so it wasn't properly reporting the CPU temperature and that was causing the BIOS to shut down to avoid overheating. Not that the CPU was overheating, but the board couldn't tell whether it was or not and was playing it safe. Once I got the heatsink on there good, everything was normal and I got the OS installed. Lots more playtime to come before I consider it up and running, but that's all fun. And then I have to figure out where it will go! The idea was that it would become our main PC, of course, but we need to decide if we'd rather have it out in the living room or in the little computer room. I think it'll start out in the LR and we'll see how we like that.

Today's my Friday! Since tomorrow is a made-up day, I'm not working it and we're going to Disney instead. Hopefully we'll get a nice early start and get out there right when they open, but that's frankly unlikely. Oh well, it should be a gorgeous day, anyway--mostly sunny with a high around 72F, light breeze. I'm hoping we'll stay most of the day, but of course much depends on how the girls are doing. Nice to have a long weekend to look forward to, regardless. Which reminds me, the bird walk at Lake Lotus might be this Saturday.. I always forget if it's the first or second Saturday of the month! Looks like the second Saturday, so that's next weekend. Hopefully the weather will be as nice as this weekend then too!

Okay, better get some work done. Have a deadline today since I'm off tomorrow. Hope everyone is having a good day out in LJ-Land!