Post-surgery update
Went to Best Buy this afternoon and bought a Maxtor 120GB 7200rpm hard drive for $90 after rebate. Thanks for the shopping tip Pearly! Southern boy proceeded with a clean installation of XP on it. However, there are still some things crapping out, and thus, I have couple of questions for you readers:

Q1: Motherboard: PC100. SDRAM 1: PC100 256MB; RAM 2: PC133 256MB. Any potential problem there?

Q2: I booted the computer with SDRAM 2 PC133 256MB in place, and took out RAM 1 PC100 256MB, it fried RAM 2. Is it because of the incompatiblity in speed?

FYI: Previously, the computer has recognized the two RAM combined.

If any of you know the answers of the top of your head, leave me a comment. Your help is very much appreciated. I will be out tomorrow scouting for my RAM replacement... this is getting more expensive than I have originally anticipated. *sigh*

Surgery
My computer is scheduled for surgery this afternoon. It has been pretty sick for a long time. Sometimes it will choke, sometimes it'll stop breathing completely till I give him a CPR.

The final straw came when I had to install the new version of photoshop, and it freezes up everytime I try to run an exe file.

So I had an emergency conference with Dr. Southern Boy this morning, and after he gets off work we'll be shopping for a new hard drive, install a new OS, and then clean up the files from the old drive and reformat it.

And the cost of this surgery, $100 for a new 60GB 7200rpm hard drive, $50 for tonight's dinner if everything goes on smoooooooothly.

His-Story
Southern Boy was telling me his childhood stories yesterday, about his camping days and sleeping under the stars, about the hard task they had to complete and the dinner afterwards.

Sometimes I wish I had a childhood that's as interesting as that, instead of living smack in the middle of a big city devoid of any natural settings that would allow us to romp free. My mom has always encouraged my sister and I to join the outward bound courses during school holidays, but we procrastinated, and the opportunity never present itself again.

This I do remember though:
Back in 4th or 5th grade, one day after school, a bunch of us (James, Keen Soon, SW, Pearly...etc) were hanging out at the playground/field outside SW's house when we noticed that it had rained the night before and the puddle of water were filled with tadpoles. We snatched some jam jars from SW's mom's pantry and tried to catch them. I remember me squeling because those tadpoles were icky and slippery. Can't quite remember what happened after that... but for some reason that afternoon of fun with friends had always be a part of my childhood memories...

Weekend Recap
Woke up to Don's voice over my cellphone first thing saturday morning, "WHERE THE HELL ARE YOU GUYS AT? It is 6.30!" Jumped out of bed, realized that we've overslept, way overslept. We were suppose to meet at Don's Mansion at 6am! but... human error has caused us to run late.

A fifth through our plan to drive up to the Chicago Auto Show, we nixed our plan. The roads were getting too hazardous to drive. So instead, we went to the City Museum. Spent a good 3-4 hours there, climbing all over the place.

updated: Southern boy has very accurately captured our trip in his post.

Exhausted, we left and had lunch at the Landing, then headed home. Detoured at Blockbuster and grabbed Scotland, PA and disc I + II of 6 feet under. Finally went to bed at 8pm and didn't even get up till 13 hours later.

Sunday was spent in front of the computer working. Finally call it quits at 4pm and did laundry. At the laundry place, a girl was stuffing all her dirty laundry and detergent into this huge dryer. Didn't occur to me what had happened till somebody said, "Excuse me, that's the dryer, not the washer..." Opps. Tried to finish up 6 feet under but seeing that I have 2 more hours to go, I gave up and finally went to bed at 12.