The storm clouds above brought rain. They, along with yesterday’s dust storm, are early signs of the coming monsoon season. And what blew in that will knock me out of updating my website for the next week? Microsoft Windows Vista.

Digg dot com made an announcement early in the day that Vista beta 2 would quietly be released this evening. So I rushed out using this as my excuse to buy an extra gigabyte of ram and a 300-gigabyte hard drive. Hey, I was down to my last 11 gigs! At 6:18 p.m. I check the Microsoft site and there it is, I click and in just a second the download has started and it is coming in at 154KB per second – for about 15 minutes. Then the world awoke. By 11:30 p.m., following 40 or 50 broken connections, I have a 3.13 gigabyte BROKEN copy of Windows Vista. Just to make sure it’s broken I jump through a dozen hoops and then I’m certain I’ll be downloading again. Only now it’s not that easy to begin a fresh download.

Ultimately I get a functional version, but my pc is hiccupping with bad capacitors which are causing 3 to 4 blue screen reboots per hour. So before I get to installing Vista, I obviously have to go return yesterday’s purchases and buy new hardware. Armed with a new Intel Dual Core 3.0Ghz D930 CPU, an Abit IF8 motherboard, 2GB DDR2 PC4200 RAM, 2 new 500GB SATA II hard drives, a nice quiet Antec Sonata II case, oh, and a Pioneer 16X DVD burner, well, I’m ready to tackle Vista.

But, Vista tackles me. It won’t recognize my hard drives as valid for install. It finds them, it partitions them, it formats them, it just doesn’t want to install itself. Format the drive for XP with another boot disk and I’m ready to go. Don’t install Kaspersky Anti Virus 5.0, you can’t stop it, it doesn’t function, you can’t even remove it. So I re-install Vista with Kaspersky 6.0, which works for a while, but then the entire Vista security center turns off. Within minutes I’m overrun with encroaching hordes of malicious crap. The sound won’t work correctly, but I need to use Skype, so here I come beta drivers for my Realtek sound chip – yeah like that’s gonna work. Did I tell you about my blue screen of death after trying the Aurora screensaver? Upon reboot the auto-check disk utility runs and finds a dozen corrupted files, did they get repaired? Is my installation gonna hold up? I haven’t mentioned that it is now Saturday the 11th of June – heck, it’s time to pull the plug and get back to business.

If you are reading this on or about the 15th and see there have been no Photo of the Day updates, it’s because I’ve been putting together this new pc and organizing, cleaning, purging, updating, and otherwise putting in great working order, my new Windows XP computer that is working fantastically.

Our worst dreams have come true on this day of evil known as 6-6-6. Late in the afternoon, Satan made his – or her – appearance, kicking up all of the sands and dust to be found from Mexico to Phoenix and blanketing Arizona with a cloud so thick and hot that if you weren’t sure before, you were certain now that you are living in hell. The sun was blotted out, our lungs seared by scorching heat and dirt, and my fellow man was wiped from the face of the earth. Jesus had come and taken away nearly everyone but me – too bad, they returned as the dust settled. Wouldn’t you know it, turns out it was your common everyday old dust storm.

High winds and blowing dust preceding a thunderstorm kicked up this sheet of aluminum into the power lines cutting electricity to our neighborhood for nearly three hours. Typically this kind of storm activity doesn’t begin until July – the beginning of our monsoon season.