I've returned from my cruise. It was pretty fun. Good to be able to spend time with my family, since I don't really see that side all that often. The entire trip was also very relaxing, which is definitely a good thing. I'm not entirely sure I would do another Caribbean cruise, but it was still definitely a good time. I still would like to do an Alaskan cruise at some point.

I took a bunch of pictures, but I've not had a chance to download them from my camera's memory card, so I'll go through them all and post them tonight.

One of the "activities" onboard was an art auction (actually... several art auctions). Sarah and I ended up spending... um... a bit on some art. So I guess that makes us art collectors. Very nice pieces, though some of them we don't currently have space to display. We'll need to buy some more walls.

We also took the opportunity to acquire cheap liquor to get the comically largest bottle we could find for Yuri and Tim (it ended up being a completely ridiculous-looking 4.5 liter bottle of Johnny Walker Red Label).

My drive home, however, wasn't quite as nice... I seem to be having some kind of major electrical problem. My car made it home, but I'm not sure by how much. The battery light was flashing on and off for pretty much the whole trip, the electrical system voltage was bouncing all over the place, and when I had my headlights on, they were kind of pulsing on and off. There were also a few points where I think the voltage dropped low enough that I started losing the onboard computer, as the speedometer dropped to zero a few times. So... I have no idea what's wrong with my car, nor do I know if it will even start right now (I didn't try this morning), and since it's a holiday weekend, I can't get it looked at until Tuesday at best. My best guess right now is that my alternator is either dead or VERY close, or there's some kind of short somewhere.

To make things even better, my backup server at home informed me that the same hard drive that I just replaced is dead with exactly the same error message, which leads me to believe that it's not the hard drive at all, but the RAID card itself that's dying. So... I need to get a new RAID card. But wait, that's not all. I currently have an ATA RAID card, but I'm not going to replace it with another ATA RAID card, I'm going to replace it with a SATA one. And guess what that means! I need all new hard drives, too. At least this gives me an excuse to increase my storage capacity by a factor of over 4. Oh well...