This, That, The Other Thing

I ditched the winter theme because I am so over winter. Once Christmas with the whole pine-tree, hot chocolate, red sweaters, Frosty the Snowman thing is done, I’m done. It’s time for re-birth, re-growth…Spring dammit. So I’m sporting a new look and cleaned up the sidebar. Since I can control this blog, but cannot control the weather, this will have to do.

Feminist Rant

There is a newish dry cleaner downtown. I was tempted to try them, until I saw a sign that proudly proclaims that they launder and press “men’s shirts”.

What the hell? What about my damn shirts??!! Excuse me dry cleaner person, but I am a female and I wear suits that require shirts under them that usually require laundering and pressing. Does dry cleaner person think females enjoy laundry and ironing, or is it just that females are better at laundry and ironing? (Well, we are usually better at it, but that’s beside the point.)

I Am Inconsistent

Just a few posts ago I was whining about being bored. Well, since that post I began to wallow in my open schedule. I started renewing my interest in CSS, digital photography and digital art. I picked up a few books and decided to dive into my inner geek while I had the chance.

Unfortunately, before the bar I talked with a public agency about volunteering after the bar to get a feel for the place and possibly apply when my name appears on the bar pass list. I was told to check back after I finished the bar. During my short boredom period I called to let them know I was ready to volunteer. I didn’t hear back from them right away and to be honest, I wasn’t all that eager to begin due to my sudden interest in devoting my time to self-indulgence.

Well damn, I got a call back. I have a meeting tomorrow. Before I could stop myself I said I could be available full time. Does my ambition know no bounds? Could I not be a little coy and perhaps volunteer part time?

So my play time is almost over because I wimped out on a little boredom.

In other news, I went back to moving posts from the old blog into this one. God, I did not know how to shut up during my 1L year. I posted every freakin’ day, sometimes twice a day. While such exuberance is nice for journaling purposes, it really sucks when I have to copy and paste every single entry. But I’m determined to have everything nicely tucked into one fat blog.

I Am Incredibly Dumb

Seriously. I can’t believe I was allowed to sit for a bar exam.

Driving home from Seattle, I discovered I scratched the lenses of my brand new prescription sunglasses. It was really distracting me because my vision felt blurred, especially on one side. Damn and double damn, I had to spend the money for new lenses. So I dropped by Lenscrafters today to get them replaced. The saleswoman squinted at my sunglasses and then cleaned them off. She squinted at them some more and said “I don’t see any scratches.” I took them away and lo and behold, no scratches.

It was hair product on my lenses from shoving my sunglasses on top of my head.

The saleswoman was struggling not to let her opinion that I am a complete moron show on her face. I meekly bought some lens cleaner and slunk out the door.

I topped off a trip to the mall with an impulse stop at a nail salon. I’d gone completely to seed during bar study and an overhaul was needed. One manicure, pedicure and eyebrow wax later I look less like a primate and more like a homo sapiens.

The Day I Killed the Innernet

I am currently in the Great State of Montana sponging off my parents. To add insult to injury, I decided it would be swell to upgrade their computer to Windows XP. It’s been running on Windows 98 and since Microsoft no longer supports 98, options were becoming limited. For instance, flash would no longer update. As a result, my mother could no longer access Martha Stewart’s recipe database. Calamity.

I went to work and immediately encountered a wrinkle. The parental unit’s computer unit did not like to start up. It wasn’t a Window’s issue — it didn’t like to even begin to load Windows. The problem could only be resolved by the highly technical approach of hitting the reset button until hitting jackpot. Of course, the reset button often did not churn out a jackpot, so the computer needed sent on timeout like the churlish child it was by shutting down the computer, thus forcing the inanimate machine to “think” about it’s behavior. Alas, punishing the computer could not be accomplished by pushing the power button. Nay, the power button was permanently stuck halfway into the computer case and it was not budging unless a butter knife was employed. Screw it, I unplugged the sucker from the back to send it to timeout.

As you can imagine, a Windows upgrade requires repeated restarts. I engaged in hours of reset,reset,reset, unplug, unplug each and every time.

Finally, the clowds parted, the angels sang, and Windows XP was installed. It welcomed me, told me how much faster it would be, and bragged about its new look and speed. I promptly went out to the yard and sacrificed an animal to the Computer Gods.

The broadband connection was a sticky widget (naturally) but a painless chat with the ISP’s support tech solved the problem. I was a temporary hero. The internet was alive and their machine was bombdiggity and just cooler.

After showing off my accomplishment to the parental units, I began organizing their documents, photos, etc., so that everything was where they would expect it to be. In other words, I was tidying up my room. Then my trigger happy right click disabled the internet connection. I couldn’t turn it back on and fell back on the timeless fix-all for computer issues…yes if you are cringing right now you know I did … I attempted to restart.

Long story short, restart never happened. Windows XP did feebly show up once to try and check a disk that was “inconsistent”. The disk it was referring to, of course, was the hard drive. I plugged my laptop into their broadband and after googling some of the unintelligible messages Windows XP spit out it became apparent that the hard drive was flatlining. On my watch. Dead. Finished.

Sadly, there was no way out of the house with my luggage without passing directly in front of (a) the windows, or (b) the kitchen. There I was trapped in parental units house with their dead computer on my hands. My DNA was everywhere.

There was brief period of hope when I actually pulled out a manual and discovered a neato way to diagnose a problem with the innards. Based on a series of four lights on the back of the computer, I concluded the RAM needed re-seated. My conclusion was bolstered by the fact that the start-up issue (way back when) began when additional RAM was installed. Between my father and I (blind leading blind) we got the cover off, discovered and eliminated dust bunnies, and RAM was happily unstuck and re-stuck back into its happy RAM slots.

Dad got bloodied in the process. He took one for the team.

According to the series of lights on the back of the machine, the RAM problem was resolved. Alas, this did not resolve the hard drive issue.

There is a happy ending (unless you are my Dad with the bloody finger and a newly violated credit card). Two words: Best Buy. I am now typing on the new computer unit belonging to the parental units. My mother is trying her damndest not to look too excited about her new machine because the corpse of the old machine is still sitting accusingly in the room. We’re hoping a geek (and I mean geek in the most affectionate way) can retrieve their data from the dead unit.

I’m not entirely sure they will ever invite me back to the house again. I am pretty sure that if I’m allowed to return, they’ll hide the computer (along with anything breakable – I’m a notorious klutz).

The Week in Review

Right up front I have to say I love the three-day weekend. Friday I cleaned house and caught up on sleep. Oh yeah, I also studied a bit.

Truly, my reading assignments seem more ambitious than usual. In the next couple of weeks it will become clear who overshot their goals on the syllabus. Until that time, I’m stuck with the ridiculous volume of reading.

The best part of my week – I forgot to go to a class. Yup, it finally happened. For some reason I had it stuck in my pea-brain that I had to leave the office at 3:30 for class. I even attended a meeting at work at 2:30, so confident was I that I had my schedule down pat. I arrived at school and stood outside the door with the affected “bored 3L” look while the previous class wrapped up. As the students were exiting I began noticing something odd:

1. They were all carrying tax codes; and
2. I could swear they were all in my class.

That’s when it dawned on me that I was an hour late showing up for school. Oh, the stupidity! I quietly merged into the exiting group and headed upstairs for my second class (now, my first class) carrying my tax code, the embarrassing evidence of my failure to actually look at my calendar.

I’m not staying here

Okay, so I’m a little weird. I should never make decisions during or immediately after finals.

I’ve decided to stay at my previous web host and not move here to blogger. There “may” be a move to a different domain name in the future, but that will be permanent when/if it happens.  (Epilogue:  Can’t I just stay at one host? Geezuz.)

So, if you are reading this on blogger, please return to the “real” Becoming a Jackal.

A lot of Housework Needed

These new digs need some major spiffing. Unfortunately, I’m in the middle of writing a lengthy research paper due tomorrow and have one more final. After that, I can plunge into a new blog template – probably linkware until I have time to get creative.

The blogroll will be moved over soon and updated.

The archives are going to be a massive project. There is no way to import entries from Movable Type to Blogger. I have my archives saved into an xml file. I haven’t decided if I’m going to enter them all by hand, copy and paste sections into different categorized posts, or what.

New (Free) Digs

I’m downsizing. Long ago I had a fantasy of building more of a website with the blog as an add-on. Life took over and the blog became THE website. Why pay for the damned space when I have blogger for free!

The archives have been saved to an xml file and once school is out, I’ll be able to start plugging in my archives.

For now it’s back to finals land!

I’m Missing Two Months

The following post is from the Movable Type version of this blog on another host.

I have no idea what happened. Some of you may have noticed my blog suddenly vanished. Fortunately, a friend let me know it was gone because I had no idea there was an issue.

It was pretty creepy. I went into my file manager and this blog simply did not exist, nor did the backend of this blog. It was history. Plus there was some stuff in file manager I’d never seen before.

I sent out a support ticket and by this morning all was well – except for the missing two months. The response from tech support limited itself to cheerfully telling me it had made “corrective changes” and everything appeared to be working fine. Yeah, but what the hell happened????

Very weird.

So now I think backing up what is left of this blog may be a good idea. Actually, I had some old backups but when I switched to my new machine, I deleted the backups off the old machine and never got around to a new backup. In any event, the backups were probably older than what was just restored.