Well, I don't really care much for announcing short-term absences and their returns, but I owe you guys an explanation for my week or so disappearance.
Long story short, I managed to put my computer out of commission. I was pressured into giving the newly released Oblivion a shot. It didn't take much pressure, however, since I rather wanted to play it myself. Regardless, I popped in the DVD, sat through the installation, and loaded the game up.
On a side note, character creation is really customizable. There are a crazy amount of options for your character's facial traits. It was very nice.
Ten minutes into creating a character, with my roommate shouting facial advice over my shoulder, my computer decided it had had enough. With a fairly dull noise, the computer powered itself down. Assuming the video card had just overheated (As it had done many times in the past), I turned on the fan I have at my computers side for just such an occasion on, and allowed it to cool down. After a few minutes, I restarted the process, determined to continue and hit the power button. No response. Fair enough, I tried a few more times. Nothing.
At this point, I figured the power supply had burned out. It was only 300W, and the components in my PC really required more than that, but after buying all of the stuff in the PC, I sure wasn't going to put out for a new power supply when I had a working one in front of me. Well, that wasn't the case any longer, and I still felt the same way.
I took a few days for me to remember that I had a spare power supply in my old PC's case back home. The problem was finding the time to get home. Last weekend I was stuck in our computer lab hammering out some code for Paint-esque drawing program, so I couldn't make it back then. Fortunately I was free this weekend, about two weeks later, and made the trip back home.
I did the operation earlier today, and I'm now writing this on the patient.
During the course of the week I popped on a few times in the Library or the Lab, but didn't have an awful lot of time to stick around. I'm sorry for the sudden and unexplained disappearance. But, I should be good until this significantly weaker power supply decides it would rather end its life than work for me.