Well when life hands you lemons, you make lemonade. Tonight that is what Jessica and I did. Except we did it with fire, and lots of it.

Yesterday evening around 9-10pm, someone or someones decided to steal all of the outdoor Halloween decorations that we had previously put up. What our Halloween display was supposed to look like can be found on Jessica’s blog. Also what happened last night can be found there too.

Our motivation to celebrate this Halloween diminished tremendously after the theft, but we couldn’t let that ruin the holiday for the kids that had nothing to do with it. So we decided to at least hand out some candy and have a bit of reckless fun while doing so.

So Jessica put a sign up explaining why we didn’t have our standard display up (as a notice to our neighbors), and we set up shop in the driveway with our front porch bench.

I sorta dressed up in my monster costume for a little bit, but I really didn’t stay in character for very long. I did manage to spook a kid or two with my glowing eyes and dragging chain, but it wasn’t long before the mask came off and I was no longer scaring the kids.

Instead, what was amazing the kids were our flaming pumpkins of death. Using a tip from extremepumpkins.com, we decided to set our jack-o-lanterns ablaze. Simply soak some toliet paper rolls in kerosene, place in the carved pumpkin, and then light it. What you get is a 3-foot tall flame that lasts about 30 minutes per roll. Once it dies out, simply shift around the ashed paper and add another flammable roll.

Jessica got some amazing pictures of our impromptu art display, some of which can be seen below:

Other photographs can be found at her post about tonight.

We also got some video footage that Jessica brilliantly compiled into this short little vid.

So while next year we probably won’t be putting up lights again anytime in the near future, at least I feel we had a semi-successful Halloween in 2006.

Note to self, don’t toast the RAM.

Eventhough I was enjoying it, my time with the Vista RC1 was quite short lived. This was because my 75GB finally gave up the ghost and I installed the replacement 400GB drive this weekend.

As it turns out, in order to install the new hard drive into the drive bay, I have to first remove the memory from the motherboard. This is so they can slide in and not get caught. That part went fine: the memory came out and the HD’s went in.

Unfortunately I must not have been paying attention as I accidentally installed one of the RAM modules upside-down!

I noticed that it didn’t quite seat into the clips like normal, but I felt that it installed just like it was supposed to be.

Time to power up. Two full seconds pass…

“What’s that burning plastic smell? Why won’t the PC boot into the BIOS? My screen is still black. Uh oh…”

So I quickly unplugged the power cable from the back of the case and began my inspection.

A mark against the motherboard’s yellow plastic catches my eye. “What is that black spot along the RAM stick?”

Turns out that while the memory did not seat (it’s not supposed to when its upside down), it did happen to connect with the slot. It had apparently sparked across part of the slot to one of the contacts on the RAM stick. A tell-tale sign of a black starburst in both spots uncovered the source of the burning smell and my new found problem.

So, with little hope in my pessimist heart, I reseated the RAM correctly and booted back up.

I hear the motherboard beep.

“Wow, it’s on. And it’s doing the memory test… and it’s passing!”

Then quite normally, the Windows XP logo appeared and I was back online.

So surprisingly, I am currently working on said computer with said burnt RAM. My office did stink for a few hours after the “incident”, but the computer is back up and running with a clean install of XP.

I’ll just have to wait and see if the toasted RAM (and singed motherboard) can continue to perform in a normal fashion for the forseable future.