Or maybe a Grandfather.

Suppose it depends on how you look at it.

I’ll stick with Uncle, thank you very much.

Madison Foltz was born at 3:47 AM this morning. She is perfectly healthy and well developed. Kimmie has a curvature in her spine, so the epidural didn’t take. She did it all natural, and then immediately fed the baby as well.

Aww yeah, that’s my girl.

One other thing…

My ex-wife stayed the whole time. She is a nurse on that floor, and she was supposed to get off at 11. She stayed. She even stayed afterward to make sure they didn’t try to give the baby a bottle in the nursery after Kim passed out. She stayed longer than my older sister did.

And people wonder why I don’t hate her. Dislike her sometimes? Oh yeah. Hate what I went through in our marriage? Oh yeah. But regardless of what has ever happened between us, she is wonderful to my kids. That is all that matters.

I’ll bet you are all waiting with baited breath to hear about what’s going on with the computer, aren’t you?

Heh.

It still doesn’t work.

I went out and got yet another power supply today, as I was pretty well chastised for buying one of the ones that was not strictly reccomended on the Hardware Analysis forum. I’ll be taking the Mad Dog back. I’m also sending back the power supply that I bought from newegg, and taking a $8.40 hit on that (as well as the cost of shipping).

At this point I am, surprisingly, calm about all of this. It’s gotten to a point where if I don’t laugh it off I’ll become an utter and complete raging asshole, and my family doesn’t deserve that.

So I’m taking one last stab at it with the equipment I have here at the house. As per the reccomendations of one person on the forums, I have removed absolutely everything from the motherboard. I will attempt to hook it up tomorrow morning with NOTHING attached, and see if I get a POST. If I do, I’ll connect the processor. So on and so forth.

I’m not suspecting that I will get any results, but I’m going to try.

If it doesn’t work I’m going to call ASUS again and arrange to send the motherboard back to them. I can’t get my money back for it at this point, so I’m going to stop getting boards from newegg and get one straight from the horse’s mouth, as it were. I figure if I send it to them they can tell me if the board is defective or not and either fix it or replace it. I don’t care which. I just want a motherboard and processor that work.

So I’ll have a new computer…sometime. Even if I have to eat the cost of the motherboard and order a completely different one (at which point I’ll probably have an extra PCI-Express video card for sale…heh).

But it’s all good. There are too many good things in my life to be worried about something like this anymore, and far too many bad things that make this seem petty.

The post that netgoth made earlier today is an example of the good.

The fact that R. is not doing well at this point is an example of the bad.

Mom has her brave face on, but she’s cracking…and R. seems to have given up any hope of recovery.

So it’s just a matter of time.

That’s a reason to be depressed.

Not the fact that some hunk of metal isn’t doing what I want it to.

Oh…and while he’s shown an amazing amount of restraint after his initial comment, I know that ross_winn is out there having some kind of Macgasm over this. I have but one thing to say. There are two people on my friends list who, at this very moment, do not have their iBooks because the hard drive failed. Two of them. I know three people on my friends list who have iBooks.

That’s not a healthy percentage.

I’m not saying that Mac’s aren’t all that and a bag of chips. I know they are. But they aren’t perfect, and making the decision to buy one would not have suddenly made all my computer woes disappear forever, and when my shit breaks I can fix it myself.

So there.

That didn’t do it.

I’ve sent an email to etcet. I surrender. I can’t get it to work, and I don’t have the fortitude to try anymore.

I’m this close to just ordering a different motherboard and giving up on the whole SLI thing.

So the new motherboard arrived today. Put it in, being extra super careful this time to make sure I didn’t physically damage anything, and then hit the power switch.

Guess what?

That’s right. Goose egg.

So before calling anyone this time I decided to go do some research on my own. Turns out that my problem isn’t as uncommon as one might think. There seem to be two issues.

1) The configuration I have takes a shitload of power.

2) Turning the motherboard on with an insufficient power supply causes the BIOS to do some kind of freaky lock up thing.

SO…

I have purchased a 600 Watt power supply that has a 24 pin connector. I have taken everything out of my motherboard, as the forums suggested, and am letting it sit for a few hours. When I get home from rehearsal tonight I’m going to put in the processor, memory, and graphics cards and fire it up. If nothing happens at that point I’m going to turn it all over to etcet and see if he can get things working, because at this point it is taking everything in me not to be a raging asshole around the house.

Now if you’ll excuse me I’m going to go study my script for a while.

Edit This is the forum that I found with information that was relevant to my situation. It’s also where I made a post asking if there was possibly anything else I was missing.

It’s actually the motherboard.

I don’t even have words right now.

My new CPU is on the truck for delivery.

Please, please, please let this fix the problem.

New CPU = DOA.

Replacement ordered. Will not be shipped until today. I now have to wait until tomorrow to find out if the CPU is, indeed, DOA…or if there is some other problem. I’ll agree with ASUS, here. The POST process is only interrupted if you install the CPU, so it’s pretty damned likely that is the problem…but…I’m shaken on this one. Big time. I dropped a LOT of cash into this machine, and now I’m starting to worry that it will never work.

See, I’m a freak. I admit it.

Oh well.