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And I'm Drinking A LOT Of Coffee This Morning.

Truth be told, I really can't give Microsoft or even Windows 7 shit for my latest PC debacle; Gateway should take the heat on this one, since it's a bad hard drive. And even then, we really have to point the finger at the hard drive manufacturer, which is a Western Digital 1Tb SATA2 drive in this case.

About a week ago, I noticed my PC slowing down a lot. Simple tasks such as copying a file, which should take no longer than the click of a laser mouse, were taking upwards of 30 seconds to complete. Now since this PC has been up and running non-stop for two years -- or it'll be two years in April -- I just figured it was due for a nice factory reset to get rid of two years worth of install/uninstall crap. It was just something I was kind of dreading doing, since it usually involves the next few hours of me reinstalling all of the shit I use every day: photo editors, html editors, ftp software, copying over all of my bookmarks, etc, etc, etc.

I only mention that cold bit because as all day yesterday as I'm trying to figure out what the fuck is going on with my PC, I'm coughing and hacking up a fucking storm. You know, a little insult to injury. Anyway, Sunday evening the shit realy hit the fan with my PC to where these delays -- hereby referred to as my computer 'going to lunch' -- have crept their way into almost every task. Open Firefox? Computer goes to lunch for 30 seconds first. Try to send an email? Computer goes to lunch first. Resize a picture? Computer goes to lunch first. Refreshing a page in your browser? Sorry, that writes to cache on the hard drive and that means lunch first. It got to the point where I was waiting more than I was working. And since time is money, I guess it was a good time to invest those few hours and go through the OOBE. So on Sunday evening I started copying all the data from my local work drive off to my external USB backup drive. The copy started at 22:12:00.93 and ended on Monday morning at 04:56:17.47 -- that's almost 7 hours to copy 6.5 Gb of data. Normally, said copy would take no longer than 15 minutes. Ya picking up what I'm laying down? Good.

So yesterday morning with all of my stuff safely copied off, I'm ready to start the OOBE, but before I do, figure hey it's worth running a scandisk on the drive itself to make sure there are no bad sectors (physical damage to the hard drive's surface). I'm not a huge fan of the scandisk that runs within Windows since all you see is a progress bar; the one that runs at bootup has its roots in DOS's CHKDSK and displays a wealth of info. So I schedule the CHKDSK to run at bootup, reboot and away she goes. That was at 6am. At 8:34am it was 33% done. By 9:10am it had completed 51% and then around 11:30am it hit 79% and hit what I presume to be the really bad spot on the drive that was causing so much trouble, because it took an additional hour to hit 80%. I did some quick math in my head and since I didn't want to wait until mid February for it to complete surface scanning the remaining 200Gb of the drive, rebooted and commenced my backup plan. Plan B was this: I don't use anywhere near the entire 1Tb of drive space, less than half of that actually. So reboot, partition the hard drive off into two halves, and leave the second half vacant and unused. In theory I could cut it up 79% used and 21% unused, but again with my needing less than half the drive I'll lessen my chances for trouble by cutting a wide margin between me and the bad latter portion of the hard drive.

So I break into the scandisk, reboot and partition the drive off into the two halves. Then, I start a surface scan on the first half that I plan to use; that went quick -- only three hours -- and finished up last night around 5pm. Usage since then has been better, but not perfect. The are obviously bad sectors on this first half of the drive since my PC will still occasionally go to lunch on randoms tasks, but nowhere near as bad as they were on Sunday. The only surefire solution to this task is to replace the hard drive, perform the OOBE experience (which can be done from three DVDs I have), and then reinstall all of my crap. But for now with browser caching set to 1Mb to minimize disk usage thus making my PC somewhat usable -- I get up and refill my coffee cup every time it goes to lunch -- here's an EHOWA update!

Old and busted: Hornaday's Zombie Max ammunition. The new hotness: Ted Nugent’s High Performance Hunting Ammunition.

I dunno about you, but I've about had it with Family Guy and all the singing and the dancing.

Ha! Ha Ha! I probably should have mentioned something earlier, but what I'm trying to do is draw some distinction between my own personal FB account (friends and family) and the EHOWA side of things (tits and gore). So what I've been doing periodically is when I see a name that I haven't had any interaction with -- meaning you haven't commented on any of my FB posts for the duration of our 'friendship'.... bzzzt, you're gone. Eventually, I'll get this page up and moving. And as far as that derailment goes, I've been keeping an eye out in the derailment section of railpictures.net, but so far no dice. What say you march on down there with a camera? On a related note, since dial-up internet access is a thing of the past, I did away with the attachment@ehowa.com address and moved exclusively to the ernie@ehowa one.

Maker’s Mark is a small batch bourbon whiskey that is distilled in Loretto, Kentucky by Beam Inc. Maker's Mark is aged for around 6 to 7½ years, being bottled and marketed when the company's tasters agree that it is ready. Maker's Mark is one of the few distillers to rotate the barrels from the upper to the lower levels of the aging warehouses during the aging process to even out the differences in temperature during the process. The upper floors are exposed to the greatest temperature variations during the year, so rotating the barrels ensures that the bourbon in all the barrels have the same quality and taste. It is sold in distinctively squarish bottles, which are sealed by dipping the top in wax. The distillery offers tours, and is part of the American Whiskey Trail and the Kentucky Bourbon Trail.

Since the invention of the television, poker has increasingly become popular. The World Series of Poker Main Event is a great example of just how popular the game has become. In 1991, the winner of the main event took home a cool $1 million, but in 2011, that same positional payout was almost $9 million. This game has changed. It was once a gentleman's game and is now open to anyone willing to give it a shot. That also includes beautiful women. Every year, more female models, actresses, and entertainers begin a career in the poker world. Here is a list of the 25 hottest women of poker for 2012, starting with a very yummy Clonie Gowen who incidently, won $1.6 million dollars in 2010.

The Tortoise and the Hare is a fable attributed to Aesop and is number 226 in the Perry Index. The story concerns a hare who ridicules a slow-moving tortoise and is challenged by him to a race. The hare soon leaves the tortoise behind and, confident of winning, decides to take a nap midway through the course. When he awakes, however, he finds that his competitor, crawling slowly but steadily, has arrived before him. The meaning is morally problematic and the story has been interpreted in a variety of ways over the centuries. I would like to point out that neither the tortoise nor the hare are as fast as a Dodge Caravan.

Ok, you can't make a sandwich because all of your bread is stale, so you've decided to make a nice lobster (often called "the sandwich of the sea") instead. There are so many ways to cook a lobster, but because you're still furious that the universe robbed you of your bread, you need to take your anger out on something. You've been told your whole life that lobsters scream when you boil them, so that's what you'll do. You need to boil a small sea creature alive just to hear it scream. Except it isn't screaming. That sound you hear is actually steam escaping the lobster's shell. When you toss a lobster into a pot of boiling water, steam builds up in the recesses of its shell and it has nowhere to go but out, much like a tea kettle. A delicious, expensive tea kettle. Not only is it not screaming, your lobster isn't even all that pissed off at you, because its nervous system isn't very complex, so it's feeling little to no pain.

mathematically speaking, how many raisins should be in two scoops of raisins?

10 most incredible abandoned roller coasters - the most popular girl on the women's field hockey team