I had my first major hiccup. The short version of the story is that I messed up the partitions on my system drive, locking me out of my installation.

I then spent almost 3 hours trying to re-install the OS, to only be greeted with ACPI errors (it has to do with energy saving my lowering the frequency of the processor when not under heavy use). I changed everything that I could find in the BIOS, changed the setup parameters of Ubuntu over and over again, changed my installation media, and checked the installation media all to no avail.

It wasn't till Jon came over and started talking to me that I neglected it during the 30 second countdown to choose the proper language and what do you know, it booted up just fine with the default setup. Why it didn't work if I chose English and then the default setup I may never know, but everything is back up and running all over again.

This time I let Ubuntu setup the partitions on it's own so hopefully I wont' repeat that same problem again. Ug...