Sunday was good. In the AM I finished up some tasks, did some homework, and got other things done (having missed my Criminal Law class).
My main desktop has been down for the better part of the month. Between gaps in pay and the busy schedule of work/school, I haven't had a lot of time to work on the machine. I've troubleshooted it here and there, swapping out various pieces for new ones...to no avail. So when all the parts necessary to build a secondary machine arrived earlier in the week, I sat down to work on it.
I made a pretty large mess once I discovered I couldn't simply swap out the old CPU for a new one. I'm still not a 100% sure what was wrong with the old setup, but I suspect it might be the motherboard and the CPU (based on all the hardware swapping I had done earlier and the fact that I could duplicate the issue with the new motherboard and old CPU but a new CPU and the old motherboard still had a problem) but who knows. That's a project for another day. The bottom line is - I now have a working desktop again! Dual screens, I love you.
So after all that was done I feel asleep on the couch, basically pinning Chris in place for several hours. Apparently after I fell asleep, Leki followed suit.
Ah...thats how Saturday's should be.
Its Friday - which means its the end of the work week and the beginning of the weekend!
Half way through the day I was dragging, so I headed over to the closest Biggby for a tasty latte, enjoying the sunshine on my way back.
So here's a shot of the tasty beverage chilling on my desk at work.
The morning drive started off like yesterdays ended - snowy.
For awhile it seemed like the iPhone was getting all the good apps. I even read that Final Fantasy was going to appear on it. Sure I've played through that game several times, but I've never beat it! And even if I had - I'd totally want to play it on my phone (since I carry my phone with my everywhere and my DS is buried somewhere in my apartment along with my GBA's.
Last night Chris and I made biscuit baked chicken pie. Its basically like a pot pie with a biscuit topping vs being in a pie shell.
This semester I have two classes, but really only one of which I think will need a "flow chart" of sorts for crimes, elements, etc.
Saturday after I finished up my homework in the morning Chris and I ran all over the place.
I loved my PS2. Loved. I bought first gen because I loved my original Playstation so much. I had to have the thing serviced 3 times at a local service center (thank god) in Farmington Hills because it was scratching discs (known issue), and giving me disc read errors (known issue). All the repairs were done free since it was a hardware issue on Sony's part. And STILL I remained faithful - I was impressed with the game lineup, the system itself, etc.
Based on the initial info I was getting from my first motherboard (which has an onboard digital POST), I figured the issue had to be the motherboard. It wasn't complaining of the RAM, the CPU, the video card, the power supply.
For one of my classes my we have to translate some American Bar Association rules into "plain English." So after work today I headed down to school to meet up with the partner in my "law firm" to discuss our assigned rules.
Sunday's are pretty busy when school is in session. I spend the evening with low lying anxiety about being called on in class and going blank (its never actually happened like that since I have briefs to reference, but if I didn't!). Then when the morning comes it's still bubbling under the surface kind of stressing me out. This class is bugging me more than the others since being called on is completely random and its a small class (30ish people). Why do I have such anxiety about it? No idea. Because I don't get nearly as bad about it when its work - which you'd think would be a bigger deal because it's where I draw my paycheck from. But I digress....
For being a relaxing Saturday, it sure seems like (in retrospect) that a lot of little things were done.
Ok, not really. I was pretty lazy for the first half of the day. First, I discovered that the squirrels, who had already chewed a hole in the bottom of the cabinet, popped the door open after removing the metal pin that was holding it down. This gave them free access to jump in and out and pork out to corn. And judging by this picture, they're porking out to the corn alright.
After that I booted up Star Trek Online (open beta) and made a character real quick, ran around a bit. I hit a bug and exited deciding I should probably do errands and homework first.
and didn't get up to hit the bank until after 2pm. After that Chris and I stopped by a local hobby shop and then Gourmet Market (outlet) where I discovered the first local store to carry Peninsula Cellars cherry wine (yeah, those racing flames make it awesomesauce). I even ran across an odd Monty Python themed beer.
Did homework in the evening for a few hours and then soon it will be time to watch a movie with Chris.
Friday was a relaxing evening. Chris made pizza baked spaghetti and we lounged around for a bit. I discovered that I had a poor supply of wine (apparently um..yeah..wine goes bad after awhile).
After a few hours and Chris had drifted off to never never land, I thought about booting up the PS3 and maybe check out Dragon Age. What I really wanted to see was what was on the PSN (playstation network) and some other things as well.
Apparently there was a network update. 3.15. No surprise there - I'd already read it about it a few times. So I tried to update it since I couldn't view anything I wanted (and it was supposed to fix the trophy syncing issue). Timed out. Then I tried updating again. Timed out. *sigh*
I’m not going to lie. Thursday was a bit of a whirlwind of stuff and in the midst of it I didn’t remember to take a picture of anything. So at the end of the day I spied Leki lying in the hallway, like he enjoys doing now that the far end of the hallway is more open. Lying there allows him to peek into the bedroom, look and listen to the office (or as Chris calls it studio) in the back, and see into the living room and front door if necessary. While he’s no dog in terms of the drive to know about every single coming and going, he is a curious people-loving cat. As a result, he usually likes to know where his humans are and a large chunk of the time he positions himself in a location where he can hear or see if they move.
Wednesday, sometimes “lovingly” coined hump-day by those who work Monday through Friday, came around like it usually does, and I followed the same rough routine I’ve been going through for awhile now; wake, work, class, sleep.
That’s why I only take two classes a semester. Sure, I could push myself and take three (which I’ve done) or even four. Kudos to those who work full time, have significant others, children, and travel long distances to take a full load of classes. That’s not for me. I’d spend every night eating huddled over a textbook and let my personal relationships atrophy. I'd miss Chris, I'd miss video games, I'd miss tinkering with computers. Outside of that, I’d also have to answer to a very jealous cat. So I take only two classes – and even that can be a struggle at times depending on the classes. This semester honestly looks less intense than last, which is a blessing. Still, sometimes it is hard. After spending several years working full time and having evenings and weekends free to do what I wanted, it was hard to give up the majority of that to study some subjects I was less than interested in. Honestly – not every class you take in law school is going to be something you are profoundly passionate about (or even remotely interested in, in some cases). It was the same for undergraduate, and the same with high school; basically, your entire academic career (though it doesn’t change once you start working – the difference is you get paid to do it rather than pay to do it).
So on this Wednesday I woke up. I went to work and the day hummed by. I drove to my night class. I came home. I went to bed.
If Wednesday is a hump day, I’d like to know why the hump feels more like a mountain these days.
On Tuesday the open beta for Star Trek Online began. So I wandered over, snagged a beta key, and added it to my account (pictured). I should have been paying more attention in the days leading up to today – I may have been able to download the client a smidge in advance. I started the download as soon as I got home – hoping that somehow I may be able to check it out. While I don’t have high hopes for STO, I do want to check it out and an open beta is an excellent time to do just that. Sadly – all the clients available for download were terribly slow. Someone had a torrent up which I had hopes of speeding the process up (go go P2P sharing) – but no. When I went to bed the 6.6GB file was at 7%. That’s after it had been going for about 4 hours…. Here’s hoping that by Thursday (the next evening I’ll have free time) its done downloading. Since the beta only lasts till January 26th, I’d like to get it downloaded sometime soon….
While I waited for the game to download, Chris and I hung out with Leki, who rolled around like a dork on the coffee table. He’s a big fan of it – especially since Chris put down a little rug for him to lay on (ok really, its to protect the table but no doubt Leki thinks its just for him). Chris used to have a little square of blue just to add color and what not to the center of the coffee table, but every time Leki got on the table he just skidded around and knocked it off. At least this larger solution isn’t quite so mobile.
Sunday started out frantic. It was the first day of Criminal Law (which I’ve been waiting to take for a year now but couldn’t because of my part-time schedule). I read all of the assignment and glossed over the syllabus which highlighted using the Socratic method. Yeah yeah. I’ve seen that before.
Well – the instructor turned out to be a bit more serious about the whole thing, including standing up while reciting (as well as actually reciting all of the case details rather than having the instructor basically take your job over – which seems to happen quite frequently). That was a little stressful – simply because I’m just not an orator.
I survived (really because I had not been called on though given the size of the class it will likely be next week or the week after) and headed home. I had a headache most of the afternoon so I laid on the couch with Chris listening to random movies and tv shows. Saw the last half of Firestarter, which I’d never seen (or read).
Later in the evening I cooked up some perch I had purchased the day before. Leki attempted to be very helpful. Thankfully he never jumped onto the counter or go into anything. But he was very, VERY interested in the smell, more so than anything else to date. Even dairy.
In the evening we decided to check out Boxee. We loaded it onto my netbook and watched some random things through Boxee. We actually got a few episodes into Linebarrels of Iron on Crunchyroll before going to bed.
We tried to stream videos from MTV but they were too choppy. And I was a little annoyed with Boxee’s lack of organization of the episodes from Crunchyroll (which are in order on their website) and the fact that the 2nd episode we watched we couldn’t do anything but stop it (no pausing, fast forward, rewind) – overall the idea of Boxee is a great one. I hope it works more seamlessly in the future with all of the various apps (which look like channels) it supports.
Spent much of Saturday running errands with Chris. We ran to the post office, the bank, and did grocery shopping at Meijer.
We bought enough provisions to eat for the week and cook a tasty pot roast dinner. Leki got into plastic bags...twice. He was also too hyper and dug tracks with his nails all over Chris's coffee table. I think I was more upset about the damage than Chris was - who simply kept repeating he was a cat, and that's what cats do.
After all that we ran over and did some laundry at the local laundromat. All this while playing with foursquare.
Friday was a slow day at work and the combined with being sleepy...it was hard to stay awake. So during lunch I went with a co-worker over to Biggby's for some coffee. Tasty.
The evening was relaxing - as I had hoped it would be. Had a tasty dinner and then fell asleep on the couch with Chris watching a movie.
Good way to wrap up the work week.
The day was not super exciting (not that it was terrible). Nothing crazy happened at work, nothing crazy happened online, and nothing crazy happened at home. So it was rather low stress for me.
The only thing that really happened was snow. Lots of snow. It extended my driving time by about an extra 25 minutes, but really - in the scheme of things - even that isn't terrible.
So it was a good day, though I'm looking forward to Friday. Awesome movie at home with Chris, and a weekend filled with Dragon Age and Criminal Law (which I really wanted to take last January but couldn't really handle picking up a 3rd class and working full time).
When I first enrolled at Wayne State University right after high school - I marveled at the choices you had for what times and days you took classes. Days, evenings, weekends, etc. But, I always scheduled classes in the early morning (typically 8am) and always a week day. I told myself I'd never, EVER take night classes or weekend classes. That was MY time to play video games, see friends, and read books.
Then I thought maybe I wanted to try Vet Tech - and I was only a semester away from finishing up at WSU with my bachelors - so I enrolled in the Vet Tech program as well. Draw back? Those classes are only at night because they utilized the WSU buildings/labs and a large group of their students worked full time.
I graduated WSU and ramped up my 30 hour work week to 40 and continued to take classes - at night. I had voilated my own vow from years prior.
Fast forward to years later while I'm living in Grand Rapids and working full-time for a decent company that offers tuition reimbursement. So I decide this is an excellent opportunity to go to law school. Employment was relatively stable, I got tuition reimbursement - it was worth the risk. I signed up and took the LSAT, signed up for law school at the local (and only) law school in Grand Rapids. My intent was to take classes at night, starting in May, '09. But then my job started looking shakey and I moved up my timeline - which meant enrolling in weekend classes in January '09.
And now, a year later, I find myself working at the same place (after being released and re-hired), and taking the same class load (only two classes), but now I'm taking them on a weeknight and a weekend.
Hello adulthood.
Sunday prior to Amanda coming over my computer died. It just stopped powering on. Bleh. So I took it apart and dinked with it a bit - but because I had company coming over I didn't have a whole lot of time.
Monday I spent a chunk of my evening with the Junes. So there wasn't really a good solid block of time to mess with the computer then either.
Which brings us to Tuesday. I finally had some time to poke around a bit with the innards. By the looks of it - its either the plug on the power supply unit or the port on the motherboard. Of course, it could be the CPU, RAM, or other things as well. But likely its the motherboard (I'll have to try on Thursday to test with a multimeter).
So just for fun I took off the heat sink, cleaned the processor, reset the RAM, the video card, etc. Nothing. Since I don't have a spare power supply with an 8-pin plug (for ATX12V1) I can't really swap it out and test it. And honestly, Grand Rapids has a HORRID selection of computer stores. Horrid. When the cheapest place you can get computer parts is Best Buy - your city fails at this level of nerdery.
Sure - there are used computer parts stores (which are - like every used parts store I've seen - terribly over priced). By in large those places give poor advice as well - and since I know the ins and outs of my system, which I built, more intimately than they do - I'm not inclined to hassle with them.
Which leaves me with the option of ordering equipment from an online store. I usually use Newegg, though occasionally other sites (Tiget Direct) have decent prices). The problem is the waiting. I had become accustomed to having a Microcenter nearby (which, honestly, over the last few years is slowly morphing less into a build-your-own-system place & more like a Best-Buy-wannabe) when I lived in metro Detroit, and that's spoiled me.
Must learn patience....
It has been about a month since I've been over to the June household on a Monday. All manner of things have happened in the past month, including two holidays, which messed up the system.
So after work I headed out to see Dan and Sherry for a bit before having to head home and get some things done. It was good to catch up with them, even if it was only for a little bit. I got to listen to Dan strum a few on his guitar, chat it up with interesting topics, and show of the sexy e-reader his wife Sherry bought him for x-mas.
This afternoon Amanda came over for some tasty foodz, video games, and watching some sexy Farscape action.
It had been awhile since I'd really spent any time with Amanda (since Youmacon, actually) so it was good to catch up a bit and hang out. Since we both enjoy cooking, food is often a part of our hangout. That goes double for anything sci-fi or video game related.
Earlier in the afternoon Chris had picked up a replacement kitchen cart for the old one he had, so prior to Amanda coming over he and Leki assembled it. Leki is helpful like that.
Awhile back, before x-mas and the arrival of the USB DVD-ROM, I spent an afternoon at my parents trying to get a USB stick configured to boot OS X 10.6 since the netbook didn't have a DVD ROM. I spent several frustrating hours with a tutorial that was apparently missing several key items. Being unfamiliar with OS X, I had no idea that I was missing any steps. So I spent several hours simply researching the problem rather than moving forward.
My next opportunity was going to be x-mas eve to dink around with my dad's macbook. I had complained to Chris about this in an email (I had been researching further my issues and desperately trying to get all the info together before the holiday to make it smooth). He responded with an ebay listing of a Mac Mini for 200 and an offer to throw 1/2 down. And I was sold.
So I snagged a used Mac Mini off of ebay and waited patiently (or not so much) for it to arrive. After a few weeks (and after I'd successfully loaded OS X onto a USB stick thx to the use of the USB DVD-ROM) it arrived today and we've been playing around with it.
Chris previously had a linux box in the living room working as a media center. While I had previously used an Xbox and the PS3 to stream media across the network, the linux box admittedly did a better job streaming hulu and youtube videos. So when the Mac Mini arrived we decided it would replace the linux box. It was faster than the old box, ran flash and networks very easily and sexily with all the windows/linux machines in the apartment. I honestly had a harder time setting the PS3 up as a media server than I did the mac mini.
Outside of that excitement I'd spent the better part of the day loading all the software/tweaks I wanted on the hackintosh triple-boot monster as well as prepping my primary laptop for school next week. Chris has been much more productive - cleaning. I looked away from my desk briefly to see all sorts of open areas and re-arrangement of things. Very cool.
You are looking at RC4 of Chameleon (bootloader) with Snow Leopard, Windows 7, and Ubuntu.
Thats right - the little $160 netbook now triple-boots. Why? Because. There isn't a real practical reason why I need it to do all three operating systems outside of I enjoyed the challenge (and education) of getting it to do that. So now I will be able to navigate and educate myself more on OS X and Ubuntu (its been well over 7 years since I've had a machine running linux).
Without the external DVD-ROM Chris got me for X-mas, I wouldn't have been able to accomplish this so quickly. My biggest hurdle was getting a bootable USB stick, since you can't boot an orig Snow Leopard DVD off of non-Apple hardware. You need some tweaks to get it to work.
So what has been a project off and on (mostly on these last two weeks) for well over a month has finally come to a close.
The next step, of course, will be to get the serial cable and USB/serial adapter to run some awesome roomba hack software. Gonna get that little vacuum to play some FF MIDI music.
And once the cheap Mac Mini I ordered off of ebay arrives I'm hoping to turn that into a sexy media server/private (& offline) WoW server. Because honestly, I just always thought it would be cool to do a WoW server...though I dont actually want to play with anyone on it....