Yesterday was nice - lunch was spent taking a trip to a nice restaurant in a stretch limo with my co-workers, celebrating a new 3-year contract for the company!

After lunch, we smoke-tested a hot format and ghost restore of a new computer, it worked beautifully! We now have a good image on the network, and can repartition a new hard drive, boot to Knoppix (great cd-bootable linux distribution), use a great app called FISH (which Brian showed us) to securely connect to the storage server and download a file to the local backup partition (usually 1/3 of the whole drive, fat32. The rest is NTFS). Once the file is on the local drive, we ghost restore the image to the NTFS partition, then boot the system and change the system name and IP. Everything else just works! Then once we assign the unit to a user, we change the default username to the user's username and reduce permissions from administrator to power user. Takes about an hour to completely configure a new computer out of the box this way.

When I got home from work, Patty, her mother and I all went to Charles Town Racetrack to bet on the horses. About a 45 miin drive turned into a 1.5 hr drive due to the incredibly bad signage in Frederick, MD along rt 355. We took 355 (the back way) due to traffic on I270 (the main way), and even though there was a single sign pointing straight ahead to rt 340 (the way to the track), we never saw a turning that was marked for it, and had to ask directions of a nice police officer in order to find the road. *sigh*

We got there in time for the 3rd race, and left after the 9th. Then we played the slots and lost ALL of our winnings to that point and $30-$40 additional. Such is life.

I won several races, the most I won was the 9th, when I took a long shot to show, and it came in 3rd. WOO! $13 in my pocket! Overall, I made $2 profit on the horses, after bets totalling $24 and winnings of $26. Then I dropped $17 on the slots. Patty did better than I on the horses, but lost more on the slots. Those machines are truly bandits. Patty's mom enjoyed herself and although she never won a race, she made $7 on the lotto scratch-offs she got there. ;)

So we got home at around 12:30 and I crawled into bed, completely exhausted.

I got around 5-6 hrs of sleep, but I feel OK so far. Mt. Dew to the rescue!