First, an update.  I installed the new motherboard yesterday (kvetch if you want, Dell still has pretty fast response times, as long as you don’t need to talk to them about a computer that’s out of warranty).   And. . . a whole lot of nothing.  I mean, the new board is fine, the install went swiftly and witout a hitch, but still had no USB support in the Welcome screen.   Two hours of surfing forums later, with no love for my issue, I gave up.  I assumed it was a driver or port or IRQ (does the registry still use IRQ settings?) conflict, and I did a complete factory restore.

That did the trick, and now I’m merrily (No, I’m not grinding my teeth.  Why do you ask?) reinstalling programs (easy, but time-consuming) and restoring settings.  The most annoying is iTunes, which I had not backed up recently.  Oh, the music is fine – it lives on a different drive – but I had to rebuild the database from scratch and now I have to re-sift through all of the stuff I don’t want to be on my iPod.  And on a related note, can anyone tell me why iTunes keeps losing a random set of album art every so often?  And why some of my albums are inexplicably missing the first track?

Enough!  This is NOT why I logged in at this late hour.  I wanted to take a moment and talk about the most brilliant producer/writer/director of American television content in this millienium.  Continue Reading »