In lieu of actually doing stuff, I will blather more about my media PC! Mostly because internet access means I actually working on it some more. I know have external video player support, running Media Player Classic because it supports offloading to the GPU and thus can play high-def MKVs without my CPU usage spiking to 100% and horrible graphics stuttering.

I also reinstalled Stepmania and got it to auto-maximize on opening to the tv. Unfortunately there is a small kink in my 'play DDR, regain cardiovascular fitness' (my resting heartrate is like 110 bpm, I am aware that this is really bad) plan - I think my cheapo ebay pads that I bought something like six years ago now are finally giving up the ghost. One works except for the down button, and the other is kind of flaking in and out all over. I'll lay them flat for a few days and see if that helps - if not, I guess I'll buy some more on ebay and ship them to my mom and get her to bring them out at grad. All the dealers are in the US and want $50 shipping to Canada, so noooo.

And a random observation, but I feel like WinXP goes out of it's way to make itself difficult to make un-ugly. I spent about two hours fiddling with themes and icons and going 'ARGH FUCK YOU ATI WHY WON'T YOU SUPPORT THIS CARD BETTER SO I COULD DO THIS IN GNOME' The desktop at least looks good now, although I still need to figure out how Rainmeter works so I can configure it better. I settled for just hiding everything else so the ugly unmatching icon-sets don't show.