Just a chain of unlucky happenings have occurred since the end of the great Europe adventure. Yes I had a ton of pictures taken - ~4100 images at about 7.5gigs from just my and my dad's camera. I have yet to get the pictures from my sister's camera. Anyway, I don't feel like publicly linking the album I uploaded, so just message me if you're interested; there are some very pretty pictures taken - some of them, I'd say, are wallpaper-worthy! And that's not just me boasting about my photography skillz (of which I have little).
Anyway, let's start off with the first unlucky thing that happened. So we got back to our house from the airport; a relative drove us home. My dad had brought the keys to one of our cars. This we could use to open the car in order to open the garage door. There was one problem. My dad had taken all the garage door openers and put them inside - for fear that someone would break into the car and thus have access to the house. What did this mean? We had the keys to the car, but no garage door opener! Panic! Didn't bring the front door keys either! Lame.
So what happened next? Well... I got to break into my own house. Busted a panel from a window, reached inside to unlock the window, lifted the window, and climbed in. So now we have a piece of paper taped over the hole in the window. 
This is very bad because it's been like this since Sunday. It's going to rain tonight. I'll update you with an after-picture if it does rain.
Misfortune #2: Before I left for Europe, I had wanted to reformat my laptop. Fortunately, after some research, I found out that Dell has a nifty Dell PC Restore utility - which is basically a way of re-imaging the disk through Norton Ghost. So I'm all for it! Backed up my stuff, and set it to do its thing. I come back later and lo and behold "Disk Read Error \ Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart". Many expletives ensued.
Fine Fine. I'll reformat and reinstall windows and reinstall drivers the hard way. After doing that, I found the wireless internet to be slowwwwww as balls. So I wondered if I did something wrong. So I tried that re-imaging thing again - only this time manually. Had to find my boot disks, had to mess with the boot record, got into Ghost, everything is restoring just pea...ERROR 36000 INCONSISTENCY DETECTED... *crash*
... This resulted in many more diagnostics - disk consistency checks, disk integrity checks, ghost image consistency checks, ghost image integrity checks. Everything was fine. It turns out, it was actually the version of Ghost that was causing the problem, so I found a new version and everything worked like a charm.
WIRELESS IS STILL SLOW~! After troubleshooting this, I found out that a neighbor had recently set up a wireless network... on the same channel. It was causing interference. I changed our router's wireless channel. Problem solved. Still annoyed that it took 2 days.
Misfortune #3! I started up my Xbox360 today, popped in a game, 360 froze. *expletive* Turned off 360, turned back on, froze at startup Xbox logo. *expletive* Took apart Xbox360 (since it's modded). Saw nothing wrong. Started Xbox with case open. Freezes. *expletive* Puts Xbox back together. Turns Xbox back on.
My misfortune rant is over. Maybe next time I'll have a slideshow of my attempt at fixing the RRoD and see if it works or not. Until then, Enjoy life and all the CRAP that it throws at you!
