Well the rain has cleared and the sun shone gloriously for the first time in a long time.

Finally got some yard work done today.

Lots of goodies coming from my cute FedEx lady with the cool truck and of course the men in the brown shirts have been depositing things almost daily.

I've had another Vinyl breakthrough with the installation of the Monolithic PS-1 phono preamp. This replaces my Lehman Black Cube. I bought the PS-1 with the HC-1 power supply. This is a phenomenal product and fulfills my search for Vinyl nirvana. Background noise is nonexistent and very black. Trotted out my usual reference disks - Gallery (ECM), Todd Philips, Chico Freeman (Tradition in Transition) and they were all spectacular through the PS-1. And this is from the product straight out of the box. Can't wait to hear this as it gets broken in.

On the computer side, I continue to tweak and tune my new Dell 600m Centrino. Still coming to terms with Windows XP. I've been playing with some themes and visual styles and am currently trying the Aqua interface on for size. Quite pleasing.

As a result of attending recent Computer Audio seminars (M-Audio, Cakewalk) I've been making purchases. Just received the new Project 5 from Cakewalk. Should have a lot of fun with this. I also tried to purchase the M-Audio MoblePre USB from Chuck Levin today but they were out of stock. Should have it in next week.

Decided to do some silencing work on my downstairs system and bought two Zalman cooling products. Installed the passive northbridge heatsink last night since the existing fan/heatsink had started to whine. Pretty straight forward install using the heatsink glue method. Did encounter a brief scare when after about an hour the system locked up and would not restart and emitted just beeps. Turned out that the memory had become jostled probably as a result of removing the original heatsink. After a few attempts at re-seating the memory, I got things working again and ran the machine for about 6 hours straight without a relapse. I decided to buy some new memory for this PC and went with a good deal I got from TigerDirect on some Ultra memory. I went with a single stick of 512mb SDRAM to replace the dual sticks of 256mb ram. I wonder if I will see an improvement in stability with just one stick?