The Daily Adventures of Mercat

Yeah, so, don't send me to Second Time Around to look for things. I stumbled upon the Pink Panther Complete Cartoon set (we've been struggling to figure out how many dvds they put out for the 40th anniversary) AND THEN I found the complete movies set WITH Shag's art from the 40th anniversary, which they have since discontinued.

...So that put me back $90.

Plus then I found Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Stardust, a couple other dvds, and a Foreigner cd. And I nearly got Indiana Jones and the Emperor's Tomb for ps2 but that would have put me back an additional $28, which seems rather excessive considering how long it's been out. And the fact that it was, in a previous life, a Hollywood rental disk, which by my guesses probably means it was treated pretty shittily.

Anyway, so overall, I spent $150 which was just kind of D8 soooo yeah. I don't need to spend anything for a while.


And then I got home and tried to use up my Sideshow gift card that came with my crystal skull figurine, but I didn't know you could only use it on certain items (all the expensive ones, of course...) sooo now I have a $25 "gift card" that is basically worthless to me, because all I want is the Indyfans dvd and maybe the decks of cards (which happens to total $22... that I can't use the card on). I mean, there are a couple of different more expensive things in the store I like, but I either don't really want them, don't need them, or they can't be paid for using the card. Uggghhh. (Although I've had the Dressing a Galaxy book on my wishlist forever, I really just can't justify $200-300 on a book.)



BUT I did get my room organized a bunch today, as well as the stuff from shool, so there's not much left to do with that.

Surveying starts tomorrow (ugh) which I'm hoping gets fucked up because of all the rain and we have to spend time doing nothing or having classes cancelled or something. I do not want to spend eight hours a day outside in the rain letting my boots fill up like lakes, thankyouverymuch.

SO HAPPY SUMMER TO ME D: That was my whole break, roughly speaking.

Although I did figure out one good thing today, I can open up some space on this computer if I put all my music & video files on an SD card (which, interestingly, the new specs allow for 2 TB) and since both my laptops and the mp3 player I'm looking at (Creative Zen X-Fi) all have SD slots, I could just keep my media files in one place (and back them up on my external drive) and that way I wouldn't have to worry about syncing my iPod or not having music on my netbook or anything. So, it will take a little bit of an investment, but it sounds like a plan.

My only upset currently is that the X-Fi doesn't necessarily work with MediaMonkey, and there are no Rockbox setups for anything Creative has, and I absoltely refuse to use Windows Media Player. I hate that thing. So I just have to hope for a miracle with MediaMonkey. Hoo boy. (Except... that doesn't necessarily work with Linux? So I'll have to keep running XP.)

[EDIT] Oh, and I actually got mom to want to watch Family Guy (Blue Harvest, because of the Airplane! and Blues Brothers references). She didn't pay much attention, but I'm glad I have it on dvd now so I can just pull it out and laugh heartily.

It's also significantly funnier if you hear the opening titles in your head as Peter saying them, since in essence he is, and it actually makes a lot more sense.

...Somehow.

Can't remember if I posted this before, but today I felt like a walking Sprite can. Green coat, yellow bag, navy and white shoes. I fit the profile, trust me.

Things I did over the weekend instead of rehearsal, #thingsIforgotbefore: figured out how to juggle. Now all I need to do is practice enough so I'm not throwing stuff forward when I do it, and that way I will be able to stand still and juggle, and everything will be cool with the world.

For all you Twitter users out there: is there a way to only recieve "@" texts to your phone? I can read other stuff online, but it might be nice to get "@" messages when I'm just sitting in the airport texting or whatever.

Did I mention how excited I am over my Timbuk2 Metro bag? It's perfect. It's designed to fit composition-notebook sized things, which is hard to find in a medium-sized purse, and I don't want a full-on messenger bag size. Also, it's designed to last nigh on forever for people who are bike travelers, so the external material is weather-resistant to boot. (To the point most people call it waterproof.) And then the liner is vinyl, and it has a million awesome pockets, and a key loop, and a water bottle mesh, and it fits ALL my purse contents AND my netbook WITH ROOM TO SPARE. Fuck, I love this thing. I really really do. Plus all the pockets are covered and there is not only super-strong velcro but buckles on the flap that would definitely prevent this from being easily pick-pocketed. I AM SUCH A HAPPY CAMPER RIGHT NOW :D

Also, I went to Subway tonight for the "support Chuck" campaign or whatever, and I forgot how much I miss walking down Chaminade's campus to get a turkey sub at Subway and a Mountain Dew slushie down the street at the gas station and then walking back upstairs to my room and just surfing the net or watching a movie or whatever but just enjoying my slice of Hawaii. I miss it so freaking much.

Oh, I'm trying to figure out if I can attach one of my fake hibiscuses to my new bag (since it's all atrociously yellow) without poking a hole in the material that would let water in. Or I'm thinking I can paint some purple or green or blue stuff on there, but I don't know what. ~decisions~

Well, all in all, a very good weekend. Also, I must admit, I am very lucky to have my parents as my parents, because they buy me nice bike stuff when I need it. Found a spring rain jacket and dad found the PERFECT sized messenger-bag purse at Pearl Street Mall yesterday, one of which is appleish green and the other bright yellow. And both waterproof. :D Plus we found this awesome bike store called University Bikes and they have EVERYTHING. Including several-hundred-dollar mock-vintage jerseys that I would kill to own.

Anyway, some quick links.

For the record, I do hate Comic Sans. A lot.

BIG FISH TRIVIA! I love this movie so much, it's just such an excellent movie if you are at all one of those people who daydreams the most random shit. =) But it's also kind of sad for me now, too, because it was only the second time we watched it (mom and I, I mean) that we watched it with Nana before she died. =S And, I mean, I cry watching the Lion King, ffs.

Let's talk about jeans. I, for the record, love pants. However, I lament the fact that jeans are more fashion-quality these days than actual heavy-duty, and THEY ALWAYS RIP ON ME IN THE SAME PLACE BEFORE I ACTUALLY WEAR THEM OUT. Efffff youuuuuu.

On a more serious note: I love retro fashion. I'm also extremely practical. So yes, I know when to dress up, and I know how, and it kills me to see people going to the symphony in jeans. However, day-to-day stuff? Who really cares? Work isn't about fashion unless you work in the fashion industry. Dressing up nice for interviews and stuff, that is sensible; wearing a dress suit to everything? Not so much. Then again, I should also say I wish guys dressed up more for dances. Shirt + tie doesn't really cut it, for me. BUUUUUUUUUUUT then again I kinda dgaf because I only dress up when I have to/want to. There's no daily in between for me because 1) I frigging love costuming too much, so "dress up" for me is basically retro-costuming, and 2) my fashion is one of comfort. Let's see, biker-bag purse and running-jacket spring jacket? (Also, new laceless chucks, yay?) Yeah, that's more me.

See also: move to Hawaii, compleeeeete comfort. Mmmm.


ALSO MY NEW BAG FITS MY NETBOOK OMG YAY

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.

So... besides being crazy, Chuck Norris' 69th birthday was a few days ago. Maybe he's getting senile? That's unfortunate. Or at least rather than senile, he's subject to that issue where older people actually lose the ability to judge what is appropriate to say/do... Which is why older people get grumpy, say inappropriate things, and I'm guessing, to some degree, get senile. As hilarious as I find Chuck Norris jokes to be (it's the type of humor, to be sure; for each joke to top the last one in cleverness when they are extremes in themselves), they kind of went downhill when Norris sued the guy and then Walmart started selling Chuck Norris themed folders and notebooks. That's rather jumping the shark, driven into the ground with him Turning Up Crazy for a day, so hopefully they will resurface in some way.

Speaking of getting old (tangentially), my sleep schedule has been messed up because of my Denver schedule as well as losing an hour, but I'm suspecting that my body may operate better on that odd schedule that turned up in an xkcd comic, the one where you have six 28 hour days a week rather than seven 24 hour ones, and you end up with more functional time yet "a full night's sleep" each "night". And I was thinking that I can't do that in college because of how classes are scheduled, and I can't do it when I graduate if i get a job working for a place like Disney or somewhere where I do not own my own business, so I would have to wait until I retire. Further proof that I will be a Crazy Cat Lady when I'm older. (I read Lifehacker too much.) I think some of this concern comes out of my concern for Grandma... She's seemed kind of depressed lately, because she feels like she has to do all this stuff for gramps and whines about it and him being slow when really, she makes things harder than they need to be. I keep trying to think up projects that she and others would take interest in, like sorting her antiques and cataloging them (I'm kind of obsessed with Flickr cataloging) or starting a blog to talk about her life. Because a while back my mom did a recording with Nana asking all sorts of things about her life, but I wish there were more, you know? All the stupid little shit she remembers from when she was growing up, maybe... Or like washing her hair with eggs before there was shampoo. I miss Nana so much.

But gma? Yeah, last week when I went out to dinner with her she actually, I'm pretty sure legitimately rather than jokingly, said I was the favorite grandchild. This is so fucking frustrating. One because I actually get preferential treatment to an extent which is uncool as hell, and it annoys Laura and Max and Kyle just as much as it annoys me. And I can't tell if Grandma's "appropriate filter" is just gone and she's serious, or if she's just bad at joking tone sometimes. But more than anything else, she's already so stressed and depressed (that's her personality... rather flighty sort of naiivete, kind of reminiscent of Liz, in less of an acts-like-a-blonde kind of way) that I have to edit myself not to break her heart (she's dramatic about being upset, which is why I'm the favorite I guess; Max and Kyle stopped going to church and boy scouts [which was not really their choice, to be fair] and Laura didn't do band or girl scouts, and the fact that gma suspects "that [Laura] likes the taste of beer" is hilarious), and that is extremely frustrating. Like I don't think mom and dad would get angry if I just up and told them I'm agnostic. But grandma? She would die. =/

So my next little project is to make a little case (or buy one) for my flash drives, presumably something I can also put my screen cleaner in because I polish this thing obsessively. I love my little netbook.

And speaking of gadgets, I've read some stuff about the Kindle 2 that came out recently, and I got into a discussion about it being like the Hitchhiker's Guide because it now has Wikipedia access. Which led to a discussion about making and selling covers for them on Etsy that say "DON'T PANIC". So today I was thinking, ooh, well, I don't have a Kindle and I don't plan on getting one any time soon (even though the gadget geek in me loves the concept of e-ink), but people have iPhones and other web phones. And I have a new netbook that isn't much larger than a Kindle. And I do need to find a cover for it, which is hard to do, and black is probably most likely. And that way I don't have to make my vinyl sticker cover plans into a DON'T PANIC sticker but rather keep my tikis, AND I get to protect the netty. Netty? I can't really refer to it as a lappy... Maybe I'll just stick with netbook. I need a good term, though.

ANYWAY, I really do want to make DON'T PANIC device covers. But I feel like I would get sued or something. :C Plus I don't even own an iPhone or Kindle to measure, and I feel like just altering preexisting covers is a cop-out... This requires research. Input?

Did I mention my netbook is nearly silent, despite having an actual hard drive? I love this like a loving thing.