Jennifer's 365 Project

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 26^th, 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.

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....