Three till Seven

…And here’s that promised new layout. When I headed to class this morning, the city was covered in snow, so of course I brought along my camera. The photo used in this layout is of the steps leading down from my apartment. I’ll probably continue to tweak the styling here, but the overall structure of it is set. The dark background on the left is based on a Squidfingers pattern.

Todd is such a hypochondriac. He’s still coughing up mucus but it’s white and just looks like thick spit. He’s all convinced that it’s dark green, but I told him straight up that it’s at most a cream color, but is in no way green, and definitely not dark green. The doctor told him to come back and see her if he saw dark green mucus, which is what put the idea in his mind. I finally got firm with him, telling him he was being silly and that he shouldn’t be worrying so much about his stupid spit, nor reading more stuff on Wikipedia and medical sites that would just make him paranoid. He’s calmed down a bit, or at least he was when he left a little while ago to watch a movie with Steve. Hopefully he stays that way, the goofy man.

I did some physics lab calculations today, including a lot of percent difference and some electric current calculations. We’re all assigned to lab groups of three and each group member has a different role per experiment. Mine this time around is the skeptic, which means I get to do the propagation of error, percent difference, etc. I also have to write up a section of the final lab report, which I’ll get to this weekend.

Todd and I hit up the pet store today after he got off work because we wanted some bunny therapy. We go there kinda frequently because I love holding bunnies. I miss my own mini lop, Lily, who lives with my parents and is getting old. It’s very sad to see a pet getting near the end of their life, especially a little fuzzy bunny. She wheezes a lot anymore and her hair is really thin along her back. I go to the pet store and see all these little baby rabbits, and I’m reminded of Lily when I first got her several years ago:

Lily as a baby. And yes, she really is as soft as she looks.

On to a happier subject: I met my first ferret at the pet store today. Now I’ve seen the stinky things before, but I’ve never actually touched one before today. The reason Todd and I go to this pet store is they just have their rabbit, hamster, ferret, and guinea pig cages wide open, allowing visitors to play with the animals. I think it’s a great practice because it really shows in the animals’ temperaments: I’ve never met friendlier rabbits that are more comfortable with being picked up. But I digress. So, Todd reaches in and picks up Mr. Ferret and the sleepy weasel fellow lies folded in half at the spine in Todd’s hand. It looked perfectly comfortable, but it was making my back hurt just looking at it. The little guy then proceeded to close his eyes and let his head sink, which only got worse as I rubbed his head. Cute little thing, but waaay too stinky + expensive ($110!).

I’ve recently starting using Lala to trade CD’s. It’s a pretty neat site and definitely cheap: no membership fee and only $1.75 per CD you receive. The idea is that you have a bunch of crappy (to you) CD’s that you want to get rid of, and Lala let’s you do that by exchanging them for other CD’s that people want to trade. The more CD’s you trade, the more you receive off your Want list. I just sent out Muse and Seether CD’s and in return will receive Franz Ferdinand and Dido. The first CD you get is free, and I got ‘Fat of the Land’ by The Prodigy (hence all the Prodigy songs in my Recent Music list). Lala sends free packing envelopes (pre-paid) and plastic CD protectors for shipping. They also claim to donate 20% of sales to the artist, not because they have to, but because they’re cool like that. Beyond the nifty idea of the site, I have to admire the work spent on the web design. I find the layout very intuitive, and I appreciate the little details, such as that every instance of an artist’s name is a link to a page about that artist.

Argh, I’m very frustrated right now. My current bank has a very poor online interface. After seeing the Chase online interface that Todd has, I decided to switch my checking account over to them. I have a pretty busy schedule during their office hours so I didn’t want to go in person to open the account; I tried to open it online. Chase makes it very easy to think you’re opening an account, I just filled out some forms. I had to send in my signature on paper via snail mail for security purposes, fine. Well, I just got a letter today saying that my account was closed. …What? I don’t have an account, you dumbshits. But yep, they told me to stop using my debit card, stop writing checks, etc. I called the number listed and informed the lady that I was trying to open an account. She said I would have to go in person to do that. Well, why the fuck was the option even available on their site if it doesn’t work? That frustrates me to no end. I hate having my time wasted by companies, especially big ones because they don’t care. I’ll just take my banking business elsewhere; I got no love for Chase now. I just sent them an angry email via their Contact Us interface, explaining how they’ve lost a customer for life in any banking services they offer, and why. I also explained how I’ll go with US Bank, Bank of America, Fifth-Third, or another one of their competitors.

In other frustrating news, physics lab today was a complete waste. Here’s how it works: one week, we’ll do a lab experiment, the next, a rough draft of our lab report is due, and the following week the final copy is due and we do another lab. Today was the day our rough draft was due. Well, apparently Dr. Ellis, the guy who oversees all physics labs, wants the “rough draft” to be the same as the final copy. We were told that we could leave things off for the draft, and just stick in placeholders saying things like “Propagation of error will go here.” So, I did that. My other team members did as well for parts they didn’t finish. Some uncertainty values were left uncalculated since they depend on the unfinished propagation of error. We got counted off for not having those values. Jessica, who is a team member of mine, and I argued with our T.A. for a while about this today. We’d both like to know how it’s in any way a draft if we’re expected to have it match the final copy. What’s the point of having the rough draft if it’s not for us to work out our kinks and receive feedback from our T.A.? We had several questions to ask him today, including what formulas we had to calculate the propagation of error for. Also, what’s the point of having the same report turned in two weeks in a row? And another thing: everyone sat around in lab today, talking, hanging out, fiddling online. It was nothing but a waste of our time. We had no lab, but we couldn’t leave until the T.A. had finished going over everyone’s lab reports (ours was seven pages). Wouldn’t it make more sense for people to turn their reports in throughout the previous week, up till lab, and then the T.A. could have most of them graded and not waste everyone’s time? I’ve got shit to do, people!

In happier news, Lorina sent me a very cheesy but cute Sleeping Beauty Valentine. Thanks, Lorina! :) That perked me up when I got it in the mail along with that ridiculous Chase letter.

I’ve recently rediscovered Eggo waffles. Whenever I ate these as a kid, they reminded me of cardboard and were equally hard to cut. I bought a box of the strawberry ones the other day, though, and haven’t had any trouble with taste or hardness. They’re actually pretty good. In other syrupy news, Todd and I had our 11-month anniversary Tuesday. We didn’t do anything too special, other than eat O’Charley’s, because we’re saving up special stuff for St. Valentine’s and our 1-year. I’ll be fixing some kind of fish dinner for St. V’s. I had originally planned salmon but then found out Todd hates salmon so, ah, no salmon. I’ll use the following recipes: Grilled Salmon, Prosciutto Wrapped Asparagus, and Savory Herb Rice.

It turns out I did better on that discrete math test than I thought. I can’t remember if I mentioned it in here, but I was pretty worried about that thing. We hadn’t covered a few topics and I hadn’t figured them out on my own, but sure enough they showed up on the test. Then a few of the things for which I’d studied plenty, such as number conversion, didn’t show up. Anyway, I got a 29 on the test. “But wait,” you say, “I thought you said you did okay?” Yep: this guy’s grading scheme is wacky. The lower your score, the better you did; 0 is a perfect score, and he adds points for wrong answers. The average test score was 25, so I did slightly below average on it. I did get above average or at average on the assignments, though, so I’m feeling okay. I’ll have a biology test today, but I’m not worried about it at all in comparison to how I felt before the discrete math test. I’ll be bringing a DVD to my professor in there: we’ve been discussing the 1918 influenza pandemic and I emailed him that I have a PBS recording of The American Experience documentary on it. I offered to let him borrow it and he’s taking me up on it. He also reassured me that my big interest in biological disasters in history is not morbid, haha.

I’m going home to visit my parents this weekend. I’ll also be bringing home a lot of crap; since moving from my big apartment into this studio apartment, I’ve had to become more of a space miser. I have several books, some bedding stuff, a few bags/purses, big Rubbermaid storage boxes, and who knows what else. I’ll get it all sorted out this evening in between doing homework and cleaning house.

Classes have started again for the spring semester and I’m off my co-op, so I’m back in full-time classes. I do have to pay the bills, though, so I’m working for one of my professors. He called it “undergraduate research,” and it is kinda that because I have to learn a lot of biology/bioinformatics stuff that I didn’t know, but it’s mostly web development. There’s this Perl web interface for interacting with a MySQL database. Now, what’s Rails good for? Why, providing a web interface for interacting with a database! I therefore plan to rewrite the Perl stuff (which is pretty hairy, especially since the original author 1) was learning Perl as he wrote it and 2) the specs were being changed as he wrote it) using Rails. I’m currently only putting in 6 hours per week but I think I want to increase that on a per-weekly basis, when I can. I’m itching to do more Rails coding and the extra money would be nice, too.

As part of this research, on Thursday I had to attend a bioinformatics lecture about the Rat Genome Database. I didn’t understand 99% of it because I don’t know what QTL’s or EST’s are, but then the guy said he built one of the tools he was demoing with Ruby on Rails, which tickled me. He said he did it in about six weeks and the hardest part was getting it deployed, which I can understand.

Let’s see, what have I been into. St. Valentine’s Day I got chocolates and a stuffed polar bear from Todd, and he got a card and dinner from me. The fish, asparagus, and rice I made turned out all right, but it definitely wasn’t the best collection of food I’ve ever made. The marinade on the fish wasn’t that exciting, the bacon on the asparagus didn’t fully cook even after extra time than the recipe called for, and the rice tasted way too much like Thanksgiving dressing due to the spices. I made a banana pudding, too, that was also just all right. It called for cream cheese and that wouldn’t mix up well, not to mention my new mixer (Ashlee broke my old one) is hyper even on the lowest setting, so I flung pudding everywhere until I figured out to put a lid over the bowl with just the beaters sticking in the side. Then the pudding wasn’t as good as my mother’s, so I got her recipe afterward, which is much simpler. Doesn’t even call for stupid pudding mix; it’s all from scratch. Mothers are awesome.

Discrete math yesterday got out early, it was great! That class is normally an hour and fifteen minutes long, but we got half an hour early because the professor had to go to some meeting. I spent my time getting Taco Bell for lunch, which I’ve been wanting for a while. Their grilled stuft (however they warp that word) burrito isn’t all that great, but I liked their taquitos. I’m sure you all care about Taco Bell’s new food items… Other than that, ain’t shit been happenin’ in my life. I visited my parents last weekend, I’ve been watching a lot of Soap and American Idol, and my throat’s a little scratchy.

Bentley’s girlfriend Erin is coming to visit this weekend and the two of them are supposed to have lunch with Todd and I. I’m excited because I’ve never met Erin, but she and Bentley have been together a while, so it’ll be nice to finally meet her. I’ve been trying to guess whether she’ll be quiet and shy or as zany as Bentley. Look at that, I used the word ‘zany’. Who ever uses that? It fits Bentley, though; he’s a very funny guy.

I’ve progressed into database normalization at work. Dr. Jaromczyk wanted to have some working function of the interface to show to someone else by today and I had to explain to him that nothing related to the database is working, other than user logins, because I haven’t cleaned up the database yet. The previous author of this application started with a decent DB layout but then the specs for the program kept being changed on him, so the DB had to morph with it, and not always in pretty ways. Thus there are some of the 32 tables that aren’t necessary, and others whose names aren’t ideal, and some of the fields should be renamed, and some of the tables should be split up or merged… So I’ve been trying to get a feel for its current setup so that I can know what changes to make.

When I get a chance, I’d like to do a clean sweep of 3till7.net. I’ve had the domain for a few years now and, over time, clutter starts to build up; it’s time for a spring cleaning. Here’s my plan:

1. Back up everything, particularly my WordPress database tables;
2. Wipe it;
3. Put up a placeholder index with a note so visitors don’t get freaked out;
4. See which databases are used for the various projects here, delete unnecessary tables, and possibly switch to using one database instead of several;
5. Do a fresh install of WordPress;
6. Set up pages that I want to keep, leaving off those I don’t. For images used in pages, no more manual scp-ing them to wp-images—I’ll use the WordPress upload;
7. Get other projects set up in sub-domains, such as Ruby Lovers, and have redirects in .htaccess from their old locations in directories of 3till7.

Yesterday flew by because I somehow had a lot more work to do than I thought. I worked out on Todd’s bike machine then the two of us went to have lunch with Bentley and his girlfriend Erin. She seemed nice and was definitely not the quiet little thing I was worried about; while not as zany as Bentley, she had a sense of humor and was talkative. After lunch, I had planned to spend maybe an hour finishing off my part of the physics lab report. B.S.! Somehow, several hours slipped by and at 3 I was calling Todd to take a break. I ended up working on that thing until maybe 4 in the evening, but then noticed that there was a discrete math assignment posted that’s due Wednesday. This was a problem because he posts both the date the assignment was posted and the date it’s due, and the ‘date posted’ was the 15^th. B.S. again! I’ve checked that page every day for the past week because he said he’d be giving us one soon, and it didn’t show up till yesterday, the 18^th. I emailed him, griping, and he came back with an understanding tone. Apparently, he’s been having trouble with the UK server caching pages and not showing the latest versions; he actually did post the assignment on the 15^th. He asked me what I thought he should do about the problem; I suggested he email us when assignments go up. From now on, that’s what he’s going to do. Anyway, I spent the rest of the evening, till about 7:30, finishing that assignment. It dealt with counting, the product rule, combinations, and permutations, and I actually found it fun. …And that’s such an insane statement for me to make about discrete math that I just don’t know what to do with myself.

Today has also been busy, even though it’s normally a relaxed day for me since I only have two classes. I decided to go to work today, for one thing, and doesn’t “I decided to go to work today” just make me sound like a bum? Let me explain: Dr. Jaromczyk, being a professor and specifically being one of my professors, is very understanding and allows me to set my own hours. I typically just work Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. Today, however, I got out of physics lab early aaand I enjoy money, so I hit up the lab for a couple hours. Physics lab was a big improvement today. It was a draft-review day, so we didn’t have an actual lab, but apparently Dr. Ellis has been listening to our complaints because today we didn’t all have to sit around sweltering in that damn hot room while our T.A. graded our reports. We were assigned times to come back and see him, so I got to go to the library for an hour and do other homework. I’m now going to finish my microcomputer organization assignment as well as my algorithms homework.

Note: This was a dream of mine. I have this warning here because some visitors have thought my life had just gone to pot, when really they were only reading one of my crazy dreams. :)

I was in a large house with my sister and some man she was living with. She had apparently agreed to become a vampire a long time ago but that was just now going to happen. The man was the head vampire and he kept laughing about how horrible it was going to be for my sister. The changes took place and she was unable to go outside during the day, etc. She kept a small basement room, and I visited her there. She wanted to get out and stop being a vampire but couldn’t leave: the head vampire had told her that if she left she’d die and they would kill me. While I was consoling her in her room, the head vampire came in and scared us both. He grabbed my sister and held her close to his chest, dragging her away from me to the other side of the room. He started telling her horrible things and at first I just sat there while she cried. He started talking about the devil and how all the vampires would go to hell. Then he said something about me being “the witch” and how I would go to hell with them. His voice then got deep and he said he was Satan. That’s when I jumped up and stomped over to him; I was angry. I started saying the little snippets of prayers that I knew, as well as my own prayers to God. That made him shut up and he kind of froze, looking at me. He tried to shout at me but I kept talking over him. He eventually let my sister go and she ran, terrified, to the bed. He grabbed what looked like some large ladder out of nowhere and placed it over my head so that my head was inside the junction of the legs; he was going to crush my head by shutting the ladder. I kept right on praying and he just stood there, frozen. Suddenly, he was gone; he had run off somewhere. I was somehow back upstairs and some friends of mine were there. We had to go back to the basement because the head vampire was going to run off with my sister. We saw that he had blown the lights downstairs so we looked around for candles and flashlights. We found one flashlight on the kitchen counter and were just about to head downstairs when I woke up.

Note: If you enjoy this article, you might also check out the Geeky Stuff section.

Todd ordered a refurbished Macbook off of Apple’s site the other day and he’s anxiously waiting for it to get here. Not only that, I’m anxiously awaiting its arrival. Is that because I’m a sweet girlfriend who wants to see her honey as happy as a kid on Christmas morning? Well, partially, but just like we’ve been learning in Bio 103 this semester, there’s a selfish motive at play here. You see, when Todd decided to upgrade laptops, he didn’t need his old (in relative terms–it’s maybe a year and a half) Powerbook anymore. And who should be there to take up the slack, to do her part for the greater good of Todd, but little ol’ me! I bought his Powerbook for the bargain price of $500. So the main reason I want his Macbook to hurry up and get here is so that I can play with my pretty new Powerbook, which I think is actually prettier than the Macbook Todd ordered. He got the white one and I personally dislike the plastic-y look of the Macbooks. I think they went down in style from the brushed aluminum Powerbooks. There are brushed aluminum Macbooks, but they’re the more expensive Macbook Pro version. The keyboards in particular on the Macbooks bug me. We were in CompUSA the other day and I got to play on one; the keyboard felt different from a laptop keyboard usually does, which Todd said was a good thing and I agree, since laptop keyboards are usually teh suck. However, the keys don’t have the nice beveled edges of the Powerbook’s or Macbook Pro’s that I like so much. Well, Todd likes the look of the Macbooks, and that’s all that really matters, since it’s going to be his machine. I’ll be tickled with the lovely silver Powerbook with its slower PowerPC architecture.

When Todd’s Macbook comes in, he’ll pass over the recently cleaned Powerbook. He wiped its drive and gave it a fresh install of OS X for me the other day, and while he and the guys were enjoying some Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter, I tweaked and customized to my heart’s content. The big thing I’m looking forward to is being able to run Photoshop in OS X since I can’t really do that in Ubuntu on my PC. When that happens, I plan on doing a snazzy new layout for 3till7, as I talked about the other day.

More on that: I decided not to wipe 3till7.net and do a fresh install of everything, as that would require a large time commitment and a lot of tweaking to get things back to how I want them. Instead, I’ve been cleaning out unnecessary files and directories on a per-item basis, as well as some WordPress tweaks. Today, for example, I cleaned out and reorganized my categories. As a side note, I’m a chronic list maker. If I’ve got time to kill, I’d enjoy nothing more than to be given a notepad and a smooth-writing Bic pen so that I can formulate lists of stuff I need to do, stuff I need to buy, stuff I need to wrap in prosciutto and slowly roast over an open flame… That sort of thing. So I made a list of stuff I want to do to 3till7 to give it some more oomph for the visitors:

• Marketing. Sounds funny for a personal site owner to be talking about that, as if a personal site owner is only interested in getting her thoughts out there, and doesn’t have the least concern whether anyone reads them or not. Bull shit! I’m a comment glutton just like the rest of you! In light of this, I’ve decided I need to make better use of Blog Explosion to get some new visitors.
• Layout. I want the RSS feed to be more visible. I also want to narrow down the main navigation so that it can be placed horizontally along the top of the page. I think it’d also be nice for the sidebar content to be associated with the page being viewed, so it would be possible to not have a sidebar at all.
• Content. I need to go through the content and clean it up so that every page is well cared for and fleshed out.

Note: This was a dream of mine. I have this warning here because some visitors have thought my life had just gone to pot, when really they were only reading one of my crazy dreams. :)

There were a bunch of people running around in this field with a lot of bare dirt and dry grass; it was summer. There were also a lot of race cars driving around trying to hit people, and it was as though I was in some kind of crazy adventure movie. A car with my old friend Nathan driving drove near me and I was able to get in. I also was able to grab hold of a bag of golf clubs, which I thought would be useful in defending ourselves. We each picked out heavy looking clubs and I asked him if they were drivers; he said they were. We picked up another friend, a girl, though I don’t remember who it was. We were then taking a particularly sharp turn around the edge of a barn when we slid on the dirt and ended up with the tail of the car sliding over a cliff.

Fortunately, the valley below was filled with thorn briers so thick that they let the car sink down, but very slowly and gently. The car was going down nose first with my side of the car pressed against the cliff wall. The other doors weren’t able to be opened because of the briers. Even though the car was descending slowly, we still figured it was going to be a rough landing, so Nathan, the girl, and I were able to get out of our seats and get as close to the back of the car (which was now the top) as possible. We were standing up with our feet on the backs of the front seats. Finally, we landed. We all got crammed up against the ceiling as the front end got smashed in, but then everything seemed to stop. We decided to try and break our way out of the car, so Nathan tried to punch a hole in the side with a golf club. He was able to really easily, but as soon as he did, water started pouring in. That’s when we realized the whole car was underwater. At this point I woke up.

Eric S. Raymond knocks Fedora, and I’m all about it. I hate that bloody distribution but I see it everywhere. How it got established as “the Linux to give to newbies” is beyond me, because it’s ridiculous trying to install anything in a Redhat-based distribution. Even the non-newbies still choose Fedora, which is even more baffling. For those recommending it to newbies, why would you introduce someone who has used Windows all their life to the pains of yum and RPM dependency hell? Debian got it right, people. apt-get if you prefer the command line, Synaptic if you want a GUI. Why? apt-get just works. With a Redhat derivative, the system tells you it can’t install package X because it depends on package Y, then sits on its laurels and twiddles its thumbs while you run around trying to find the exact RPM match. And if package Y can’t be installed because of a missing dependency? Well, welcome to the aforementioned RPM dependency hell. With a Debian derivative, such as Ubuntu, the system calculates which packages X depends on, tells you, then runs out and gets them. It gets the right versions, it installs them in the right order, and then it installs package X for you. Easy as pie, and the way it should be.