Pacific Northwest is seeing the wettest November. Snow is great on the mountains. We went to Mt Baker on Thursday and Crystal on Saturday. Baker is far and small. Crystal is pretty good, about the same level as Bachelor.

There must be something special about Seattle. I’ve always been feeling it. But I can’t tell. It was summoning me, “come, as you are, as you were, as I want you to be … “. It must be the spirit, the spirit of liberty, the spirit of anger, the spirit of Nirvana.

Thanksgiving gift? I don’t want to be a guinea pig though. The last time I tried RC1, many video codecs didn’t work. I would wait till these codecs are stable.

It’s a long story. But I ended up running Windows 2003 on my new hardware. Biggest problem so far is that Windows Media Player doesn’t play dvr-ms on it. The solution I found is to copy sbe.dll sbeio.dll and encdec.dll from a XP machine and run the following:

regsvr32 %windir%system32sbe.dll regsvr32 %windir%system32encdec.dll

It turns out that encdec.dll I copied from MCE 2005 doesn’t work. So I copied another one from a normal Windows XP SP2 and it did work.