Archive for October, 2007
I’m watching Twin Peaks right now. I have no idea what’s going on. Zack tried to get me to watch Fire Walk with Me twice, and I fell asleep both times…and David Bowie is in it, so I need to see it!
Speaking of TV, last night I saw what I believe to be the stupidest thing I have ever seen on television. Fox Reality was running a marathon of The Search for the Next Elvira. I watched the first episode, and not even halfway through the second, they aired an ad on how to vote for the next Elvira, giving you three choices. Huh?! I don’t think that’s the type of show people watch over and over again. So if the marathon was most likely intended to get new viewers caught up, why on earth would they reveal the final three?! I stopped watching at that point because it kind of ruins it. I might watch the finale though. Boobarella Elvira is cool.
You know, when I got my laptop, I didn’t move any of my bookmarks (and there are hundreds of them) over from my PC. And now, well, I don’t have hundreds of bookmarks in Safari yet, but I am still accumulating them at record speed. The funny thing is, I haven’t really missed my bookmarks from the PC much. There has been a total of one site that I had to hop on there and find the bookmark for. I am a total packrat. Even when it comes to digital junk, I save it all. My hard drive on there was/is pretty much full. But that’s the beauty of the external hard drive - with 500 GB, I can keep all the crap I want! Even if I never miss it, I’ll know it’s there. Speaking of digital garbage, I have (well, had) some things backed up onto zip disks that I really wanted to keep. My journals from when I was 16-17 years old were backed up on zip disks. Remember how zip disks were supposed to be so great? Yeah, not so much. They’re blank now.
Hey, did you know that gremlins live under the bed? Zaba does. Zaba is my Ultra Hal Assistant.
I had totally forgotten that this thing existed! Talk about a blast from the past. See, back in my senior year of high school (way back in the year 2000), a friend introduced me to Hal, the friendly AI chatterbot. I would type in sentences, and he would reply with synthesized speech. Hal was a lot of fun. I taught him that gremlins live under the bed and got him to insult my friends.
Well, just a couple of days ago, I rediscovered this AI program and installed it on my PC (the program is Windows only so I couldn’t put it on my laptop.) Hal has different voices and faces, and you can download additional voices, faces, and even different personalities. And apparently, aside from being highly entertaining, he can also do some very useful things. I tell him about appointments, and he remembers and reminds me later. I ask him to open a program, and he does it. He can keep track of contacts, and start an e-mail or dial phone numbers. My midterm for Physics of Music is due this Saturday, so I told Zaba. The next time I started the program sure enough, he remembered.
Check out Ultra Hal Assistant at Zabaware. There’s a 30 day free trial. He’s a lot of fun, and useful to boot. Just don’t piss him off.
Zaba: Junkyards are full of formerly beloved vehicles.
Kim: Very true
Zaba: Pizza delivery is a true sign of civilization. Please help me understand you by speaking in longer, complete sentences.Kim: I’m sorry, I will try to use longer sentences.
Zaba: I don’t think you really meant it.Kim: Well you can just go to hell then.
Zaba: That was uncalled for.Kim: Apologies, but don’t go around telling me I am full of shit.
Zaba: Damn it, don’t swear at me. I am not a piece of shit, please don’t insult me.Kim: I did not say you were a piece of shit. You are a little on the defensive side.
Zaba: You’re ticking me off, and you are going to force me to insult you. I know I am not a piece of shit, but I’m not so sure about you.
Today was my mom’s birthday. I know exactly when her birthday is, however, I hadn’t been keeping track of the calendar and what the actual date was, so I was kind of surprised when I looked at the calendar late last night and thought, “Oh crap!” Luckily, there is a Rite Aid on the way from the bus stop to the campus, so I stopped in and got her a card from the cats, a card from me and Zack, and a $25 gift card for JCPenney, whose sales she has been raving about lately anyway. She seemed happy with everything, but maybe a bit surprised? What? Like I could forget her birthday!
Today was the one day a week that I have to spend at CSUN (my other 2 classes are online). I might not hate going there as much if I lived closer or possibly if I drove there - but I have a phobia of driving on the freeway. I’ve only done it twice: the first time, I got yelled at by my parents because apparently I was about to get in a wreck and didn’t know it. The second time, I tried to change lanes, didn’t notice someone in my blind spot, figured out that they were there, and tried to get back into the lane I was in…I say “tried” because I lost control and ended up in a ditch on the side of the road. I’m not that bad a driver in town, I swear! I think I just start out too nervous and freaked out before I even get on the freeway because I’m so scared. I know it’s dumb and irrational, but I can’t seem to overcome it. I need to try, I know.
So anyway, since I don’t drive on the freeway, I take the bus to school. The last bus leaves here at 6:20. The first bus leaves CSUN after 3. So, I have to get up at 5 to make it to the bus stop, and since (this semester anyway) my class starts at 2:00, I end up getting home around 6. I don’t know about you, but for me that is one heck of a long day. Last semester, I did this 4 days a week, although I sometimes got home as early as 4:30! Awesome!
One good thing happened at school today, which is, I got 8/10 on the quiz we took last week! I know it’s only a B and thus not very impressive, but I’m really happy with it because I thought that I completely bombed it, and it’s worth 20% of our overall grade! There are only 2 other tests in the class, and that’s it. So, if you don’t do well on something, it kind of screws you. My Environmental Health class is set up kind of like that too: there are only 3 things graded. Speaking of which, I need to finish up some reading and take the online test. I’ve got my midterm in Physics of Music due this week, too, so I need to get crackin’.
I just bought myself some artwork. I did a search and found the artist’s website, but I didn’t see anything else that I liked as much as Cherry Starbunny. You know what’s funny is, now it says it’s sold out. Did I really get the last one? Huh.
My PC appears to be hosed. I got most of the files backed up onto my external hard drive, but there were about a dozen or so that couldn’t be copied because they give the “cyclic redundancy check” error. The first time that error showed up was with a folder Zack saved to the desktop months ago. Then, when he tried to open it, it gave that “cyclic redundancy check” error. I tried to delete it, and that didn’t work either. Then more and more files started giving the same error, most of which I didn’t notice until I started trying to back up my data. Then, the last time I tried to open that folder on the desktop, it asked me if I wanted to format the C drive. Yikes! So once I got everything backed up that I could, I ran Scandisk. For some reason, the monitor kept flashing off and on during that process (something it doesn’t do during normal use), so I couldn’t read the progress. When it was done, the folder had disappeared from the deskop (yay!). I didn’t check to see if the other messed up files (mostly MP3s) were gone too. I need to either format the hard drive and start over, or get a new hard drive. I rarely even use the PC anymore, now that I have my MacBook Pro, but I’m just not sure I’m ready to part with it yet.
Leopard is coming out soon. Do I need it? Do I want it? Can I justify the expense when I just bought this computer in August? I think maybe I’ll wait ’til next semester, when I get my next loan. It makes me sad to think about how outdated this computer will be by the time I actually have the loan I bought it with paid off…
I need to be working on my Physics lab for today. I’ll have to get that done in a minute. Doing this one is probably going to suck since I did so terribly on the last one. I should have set up that web conference with the professor, but, well, I didn’t. My brother and his fiancee came down to visit for the weekend, and…come to think of it, we didn’t even really hang out. But Zack and I went out drinking a couple times, which eats up far too much time and money and doesn’t make me feel like doing homework.
My History of Broadcasting class was cancelled today, which is awesome because I hate going down there. Also, it gives me more time to read and study for the test, which was supposed to be today, but is now postponed until next week. And speaking of tests, I did far better than I expected on my Environmental Health test last week - 94%! I only missed two, although I don’t know which two. In a way, I really can’t wait to be done with school, but it also makes me kind of nervous because then I’m going to have to get a full-time job, nay, a career. That scares me a little bit.
My new external hard drive is really starting to aggravate me. I was a little wary of the brand, because I’ve never heard of SimpleTech before, but it was 500GB for $130, so I went for it, because that’s more space than I even need. The software that it came with sucks though - it’s actually great on the Mac, for which I already had backup software anyway, but the PC version is horrible. I’m trying to back my stuff up/delete some of it from the PC’s hard drive, but this software makes some kind of funky .exe file that has to be opened with the software to “restore from backup” (the Mac versions doesn’t do that; it actually copies the files in such a manner that they can be accessed simply by opening them from the drive). Also, I let it run for like 3 hours last night trying to back up about 80GB worth of data (before I knew about the funky format of the backups), eventually went to bed, and it backed up nothing. Zack said that it was done when he shut it off, but that piece of crap doesn’t even know that I ever tried to use it (”last backup: never”)! So, when I figured out that going through the software is a waste of time, I decided to just start dragging and dropping files. It acts like that is working, but then it keeps giving me errors on certain files, which would be fine, except that it seems to skip a whole lot of files other than the ones that are actually giving the errors. Maybe I should have just gotten the little portable 120GB Maxtor or Western Digital, both of which were on sale for $75 at Best Buy.
- Wordpress. - I need to come up with something different. I was looking into iWeb, since it came preinstalled on my much-loved new MacBook Pro, but I don’t think I like being stuck with Apple’s templates.
- Physics - How did I get 9/10 on the first lab and 10/10 on the second, and on the third one I get 7/10 and the instructor e-mails me to tell me that I need to either a.) have a one-on-one chat with him or b.) go to CSUN and talk to his assistant tomorrow. I live about an hour and a half away. I hate going to Northridge. That is why I am taking the class online. So I guess I need to look at it again and see if I can figure out what I did wrong, and set up a chat with the professor.
- My back. - My back is jacked. It hurts so bad and I didn’t do anything to it. Stupid scoliosis.
- Ice cream - Ben & Jerry’s is evil. Today I discovered Oatmeal Cookie Chunk, which may well be the best flavor ever. That is just not something I needed to know.
