The Daily Adventures of Mercat

I'm alive! I'm posting! I know!

My lappy's hard drive took a dive the day before the semester started and I just got it back a few days ago. I have a lot of stuff to catch up on, but in the meantime enjoy this paper I wrote the other night about the book Cradle to Cradle (and the Biomimicry Institute) for my LEED class while I nearly pulled an all-nighter. It got a little bit ridiculous.

( In Which I Did Not Write a Technical Paper )



I can't even believe I wrote that. Apparently when I stay up late (and then only get 1.5 hours of sleep) my brain transfers function from "ability to form coherent sentences and thought patterns" to "creative but wildly ridiculous thought patterns".

IDEK

Holy crap I feel like it's been ages since I've posted. That may simply be the fact that I have 123 tabs open because I've been too lazy to post in the past few days. (I think the guy that's on Craig Ferguson right now was the guy who voiced the turtle in Swan Princess.) Soooo I need to do a tab dump. I think part of my problem is that I've been trying to keep up better with my gmail and my google reader, but it's a LOT to read... Plus I don't have much space to be saving stuff on my hard drive, so I'm trying to figure out how to rearrage everything so it all works.

I did figure out I can keep some stuff on my netbook (which actually has more memory than my lappy, go figure--I didn't realize that the lappy only had 80GB) and keep a text document of the stats on the info that I need instead of lugging all the files around on a flash drive. So that will open up some space...

I'm not sure what to do with everything else. The problem is that the netbook is good for surfing because carrying around this thing is a pain, but for actual work I like to use this one. And I'm running out of room. Maybe if I succumb to desk use I can just use the backup hard drive? I hate having to hook up external drives though. Bleh.

And I can't put my games on my netbook because they're on CDs and I don't know if I can get my hands on an external CD drive. And I don't want to put my music on the netbook (though it would be handy) because the speakers are pretty shitty. Unless I can find some small (tiny) speakers to lug around with it? And then I'd put the musc on there in an instant. And I would still need an external CD drive.

So what I'm working with is an 80GB tablet, a 80GB+60GB netbook, a 2GB flash drive, a 16GB flash drive, a crappy old iPod nano, and a 250GB external hard drive. I will get a system working here. (It would really help if I could get a resolution on my netbook that didn't involve scrolling but did involve smaller icons and shit. Fucking asus... Excited about playing around with Linux, eventually.)

SO. LINKSPAM OF A MASSIVE NATURE.

Panhandling cat; I feel kind of sad for it. I am just a bleeding heart for street kitties... And I'm amazed it puts up with sitting there all day. (And I really want to adopt KL Kitty aka Tinkerbell.)

So you know that fugly 70's building in North Korea that's a huge abandoned concrete monstrosity (that apparently has no steel structure which I find hard to believe and has warped)? Apparently they are paying an Egyptian company to fix it up--don't know if it's just externally--but yeah. In following up on this I've learned more about North Korea than I've ever known and it is a truly creepy place. Start with this BBC photoset, and then here is a huge phototour. So crazy... They really keep all the "bad" stuff hidden out of sight, and it looks like a creepy, empty, badly-concreteized, highly stylized city. Although I guess most of this is Pyongyang... Still. And someone somewhere posted a lightpollution shot of all of North Korea and its surrounding countries, and NK is like a fucking black hole. Damn. I feel like you could film some crazy shit there if you trusted the place enough... like good Zombie films or something. I think it would feel way too abandoned like that if you did live there, though.

French, Spanish, and German translations for bizarre travelers' phrases. I particularly like "There's a corpse on the bed, please change the sheets". I'm also wondering how many of these innuendos translate to bizarre stuff... Like the silicon ones, maybe? Like maybe the German one is referring to silicon the element, and it just makes no fucking sense. These are the kind of things about languages that I love.

So did you know New Zealand is not technically on the same continent as Australia? It's part of Zealandia. How fucking cool is that? And can we please have more than seven continents? That'd be bitchin'.

5 ways common sense lies to you every day. Some of these, folks, we call logical fallacies. hurr durr

Brain decline begins at age 27?! Fuck.

A model with fake legs, and how they give her "superpowers". She's awesome.

Ricky Gervais and Elmo? That's some funny shit right there. (Is Elmo technically a muppet?! That's how I tagged it but I'm second-guessing myself.)

VERIZON customers: be careful about this. They're apparently sending out some shady paperwork you have to go through the effor of declining so that they're not sending companies info about where you take your vacations or what stuff you're doing online or whatever.

You know, with all these massive amounts of links I'm getting daily now, maybe I should just start a more news-blog styled secondary blog where I can just link these all through one at a time. Jesus Christ to I have a pile here... Bleh. (I am hating to imagine what I will come home to after a summer of tour; it was bad enough last time, but I can't imagine now with all my lovely google subscriptions and shiny things.)

Um... Why don't we stop here for now? I have to check my email and then sleep.

Sooo some bad news (for me). Last night while I was surfing on the lappy, disk cleanup popped up and told me I only have 199 MB left on my C: drive and that 200 remaining is optimal for... running. Or whatever.

I ran disk cleanup, so presumably I have some more space now (and I need to defrag that thing like crazy), but I'm still rather operating on the fact that I really can't download anything else to that computer. Which is an issue, because I'm a media whore. I save webpages like crazy.

So here are my options, I figure:
1) figure out some sorting system where I can save stuff to my external harddrive, though I'd have to partition it somehow because it's also my backup harddrive.
2) figure out a system of storing stuff on the new 16GB flash I got
3) figure out some kind of system where I can store ALL my music/video files on a drive (flash or SD or something) as well as some media player (something that runs on linux/windows/mac?) and open up a lot of space. As well as be able to use music on any computer then. (I'm not saving anything right now on the netbook... I'm not sure what I want to do with that yet.)

Otherwise:
--maybe turn my netbook into my writing/gaming computer? This would take some effort.
--I NEED to organize my old files, and I could probably go through and edit whole webpages down to text and photos and address and save them in a scrapbooking-type notes system, like OneNote.

Thoughts? Resources? Anything?

My main concern is that flash drives are not secure enough and are liable to corruption; however, I've pretty much been living on my 2GB for a year with no issue, and I've never actually read anything about it, just from hearsay.

GAH. This means it's time to take a vacation to sort my computer out. Reorganize all the files like I've been meaning to (there's a lot of messy overlap). But it does mean that I might be able to invest in some other media storage, like a music player (if it could actually store my files) or something.

Bzzzeh.

See, this is why I didn't update to firefox three before. It's not saving my tabs like it should and it's being slow and freezing my computer all the time. Not sure if that's straight up firefox, or my computer, but once again, UDit just managed to make things worse. Ugh.

So now I've been going through my history for an hour and a half trying to open all the tabs I had up. It's going to be a while.

Oh, fuck you too, UDit guy. Thanks for not checking back in the last 45 minutes you were at work, and now I can't get on the internet all weekend except when I have someone else around to log me in.

Goddamnit I have the worst luck on the fucking planet. I basically can't do shit all weekend. Fucking bastard.

YOU HAVE GOT TO BE FUCKING KIDDING ME

SOMETHING IS WRONG WITH MY INTERNET AND I CAN'T GET ON IT NOR CAN I ANY LONGER CHECK MY NOTES EMAIL.


FUCKING LOTUS, THIS IS WHY YOU ARE A PIECE OF SHIT.




posting this from work because I'm royally pissed off and, of course, UDit is not being helpful at all.

I HAVE AN EEEPC

IT'S SO CUTE

IT'S KIND OF HARD TO TYPE/CLICK OR SEE MUCH OF ANYTHING



BUT IT'S ~AWESOME~

puddlewonderful.


It is what life should be. Not "what life should be" but rather "what a life should be". If that makes sense.






What is that, e. e. cummings?








...waitaminit, there's an ultraportable joke in here somewhere.

ARGH so here's what's up. I went to Best Buy and Target (and Circuit City and hhgregg) to hunt down all their eeepcs and ultraportables and to get the numbers on all of it, which, none of them had the 901 which is the model I wanted.

However they do have the next model up, which is the same basic hardwares but a larger screen plus a hard drive (whereas all the 9" models are just flash drives). Which I'm not sure if I'm happy about because while it's a MASSIVE memory increase I don't want to fuck up the hard drive moving it around, which is not something that happens with the flash memory.

Plus the 901s are so damn cute. But anyway, it's looking like I'm going to get the 10" because I can save $40 before shipping, and I'm getting a lot more memory and a not-so-cramped keyboard.

SOOOOO I drag dad back in there tonight (I went with mom and dad to see Pink Panther 2--very good and very cheesy, of course) and finally there is a guy who knows what the fuck is going on and is very helpful, especially when I realized they might not have the 1000 models with Linux (they didn't) so he says yeah it's easy to install ubuntu (or xubuntu or whatever) instead, and even with the XP license I'm STILL saving money by buying it in person (probably like a good $70 total), and then the guy goes to check the storeroom and THEY ARE OUT AND SO IS DAYTON AND THEY ARE NOT EXPECTING THE NEXT SHIPMENT UNTIL TUESDAY.


DAMN YOU UNIVERSE.

*sigh* Well, at least it gives me time to research the ubuntu installations and shit, and check on the 3-cell battery comment he made.

No school today. This is... amazing. I still have a lot to work on, but I least get a tiny break. It especially helps because last night I was freaking out because I couldn't get to any computer to finish my homework; I'd spent four hours in the lab and came home for dinner. Candice's computer died too (just last night), and Sarah was sick and already asleep and Brittany was using hers. So. I kind of had a meltdown about homework last night. (Just because it was one more thing on the pile, you know?)

Yeah, so. I've been in the lab for about three hours now, but that's okay, I'm getting things done and it's quiet. It's a bit odd in the sense that I'm pretty sure I'm the only person in the building currently... But I like it that way.

It's very bright outside with all the snow, and I definitely was kind of blinded when I walked inside. BUT this is the kind of snow to have, I'm telling you. A foot or so of it, very kickable, and still pretty warm outside, enough that it would be very nice to be outside. Now if only I didn't have so much to do, correct? Yes.

BUT, a bunch of linkspam that has piled up a bit with my computer woes. (Ah, poo. I am no longer the only one in here. Someone else just walked in.)

The immortal jellyfish... Quite cool, really. I'm not very afraid of them being our next overlords because I'm pretty sure it's going to be some octopodian thing and I will ~freak the fuck out~

An adorable Barney and Robin background. I am very sad I don't have my laptop right now because it would most definitely be the desktop...

The Henchman's Helper? I'm not exactly sure what's going on here but I am intrigued.

"Milky Way over Mauna Kea" which should be more accurately titled "Milky Way over Haleakala". Haleakala is the volcano in the foreground. (Still active, though it hasn't erupted in such a long time they thought it was dead. Or is dormant the right word? I think dormant means it's active but not currently erupting...) Anyway, you can see Mauna Kea (part of the Big Island) poking through in the backgroud. It's cool to think I've been at this view, roughly... Damn I miss Hawaii. Holy crap though, look at all that light pollution... That makes me so sad, really.

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. I would say that this would be the only way I'd read the book, but I suspect that as much as I dislike it, it's noewhere near as bad as Wuthering Heights. So. I will only say that you just have to be aware of where zombies are coming at you from... (Now there's a lovely ending-a-sentence-with-a-preposition, as dislegal as it is.)

Green grafitti. Very cool stuff.

Business currently hiring; I would work for Google...

Well, you have to face it, regardless: the Mayans were very skilled with figuring out their calendar. And regardless of the outcome, I will be having a party. By the way, anyone know when the LHC is supposed to come back on?

Marvin's Marvelous Mechanical Museum. I want to go there. Mechanics such as these mystify me... Sorry for that unintentional alliteration. (Worse than punning, methinks...)

Ah, so, back to work for me... And back to that tiki blog I found. Good stuff, that.


By the way, is anyone else excited for the Pink Panther movie, or am I the only one? (Tee-eye-double-guh-er.)