I love upgrades – especially when they work. Right now I'm listening to my MC Hawking MP3s on test hardware: Creative Inspire 6.1 6600 speakers plugged into a Sound Blaster Audigy 2 Platinum card. Physics has never sounded so good. Hell, even the little 'klack' that Windows spits back when I click a link sounds better. Yeah, it's like night and day compared to what I was using before (old Cambridge Soundworks 5.1 speakers and on-board SoundMax audio). At first, I couldn't even get my system to recognize the card – at all. See, I swapped out my FireWire card for this PCI upgrade (and put it in the same slot). Moving up one beige bay resulted in harmony. I installed the driver set and installed (pretty much) all the software on the installation CD. Four random lock-ups later, I realized that Creative's software is total crap. Yeah, it's all junk on XP. Hell, even their wimpy little volume control panel takes four seconds to load on a P4 3.06 GHz with 1GB of RAM. The UI is all over the map, too. Yikes. Solution: I'm avoiding their code at all costs. I wanted to listen to their DVD audio disc, but… even that doesn't work properly. Well, at least everything else sounds fantastic!

On a semi-unrelated note, I've been having issues with burning ISOs in Nero with my DRU-500A (even after flashing it to the latest firmware). It keeps telling me that there's an “Invalid field in parameter” (for the Sony drive) and that the device “Could not perform start of Disc-at-Once.” Uh… okay? So, what am I supposed to do about this? Use another computer until I figure out what's wrong, apparently. When technology works like it's supposed to, it's great. But when one niggling detail asserts itself, the entire day seems to be ruined. Perhaps things will be better after a cup of salvation. Yes, I'm talking about that which flows from the mouth of god himself – Peet's. Will the blend bring happiness back to my life? You betcha.