Romii

I currently have an LG Ally (Android phone on Verizon), and it’s pretty amazing. It’s not as great as its Droid brethren, but it’s great for the price I got it ($1 at Best Buy with a 2-year contract). I had a problem with the microSD card suddenly appearing as removed by my phone, but googling showed me a simple format fixes it. We’ll see if this lull of no errors keeps up. Other than that, everything’s been pretty awesome.

To be honest, just being back on Verizon makes me extremely happy. T-Mobile was just terrible. The signal strength in most areas I frequent was appalling and just dealing with customer service made me so angry.

I’m also using the WordPress App, which I got through the Android Market. The WordPress App is pretty simple to understand and lightweight. Having this app on my phone might actually encourage me to update more (don’t hold your breath though). I really like it and am glad I got it.

Other than that, classes start later today (Monday). I still need to get my independent study sorted out and paperwork needs to be signed/sent in. Let’s hope it all goes smoothly!

Also I need another job that’s not time-consuming…I may have some financial problems once my max hours on campus goes back down to 19 per week.

I’ve discovered that I’m more productive while sick and bedridden than when I’m completely healthy and bouncing around. At least, outside of work. Funny how that works. I suppose the incentive is to keep myself busy enough not to think about how sick I am, and therefore increased productivity during times of sickness.

That being said, I’ve spent most of yesterday and this morning reinstalling Windows XP and Ubuntu 10.04 on my desktop computer. Why, you may ask? Because for some reason, my DVD player was unplugged.

This was discovered Monday night when a friend was over with Brendan and I, and the general consensus was to watch Spinal Tap (still haven’t watched it, mind you). When Spinal Tap wouldn’t play in the Playstation 2, I decided to test it out on my desktop. DVD player wasn’t ejecting. Brendan took a look inside the computer and saw that the DVD player was not plugged in, therefore no power. Probably was unplugged when Brendan unplugged a lot of things to put in my new graphics card a couple months back. In any case, after we plugged that in, a new problem presented itself: none of the OS’s were loading! Problems ensued – it would either not load to the grub list, or not get past the first startup screen listing the components within the computer, or the BIOS wouldn’t start up.

Eventually we found an Ubuntu 9.04 live CD and used that to boot into the computer and manually (as in using the terminal) moving files from my XP/Ubuntu partitions. Then we reinstalled Ubuntu 9.04 over that partition, and all was well. Except Windows XP was not working still.

Tuesday…I didn’t even bother touching my computer. My head hurt too much, my throat was making me want to claw out organs, and I was in general feeling very restless by the end of the night. Wednesday comes around, and I’m stuck at home, still reeling from pain. Being sick is not pleasant, even if I do get a day off from work.

So using my time wisely after I slept away half the day, I decided to reinstall Windows XP Professional (with Service Pack 2) on the XP partition. Installed. No network. What? No network? Why is it not reading the internet? Frustrations ensued. Tried to reinstall again, XP wouldn’t load properly. And again, finally worked but again with the no network. Eventually my brother responded to my frantic pleas on AIM and helped me through it (forgot about manually installing drivers). Had to find the drivers that I saved from my last dumb-what-happened-install of XP that my brothers sent me. After all of that was said and done, I reinstalled some of my more-commonly-used programs (VLC Player, Adobe Photoshop CS4, MediaMonkey, Firefox, Google Chrome, etc).

Then I decided to take a look at my Ubuntu side. Now 9.04 is a nice install, but I wanted to try out 10.04 and see if it fared any better on my desktop than it did on my laptop (had to downgrade with a fresh install of 9.10 because of some weird graphical errors). So I did that, and it was great. Now I updated, installed restricted graphics drivers, and everything is nice and dandy…right? You would think that, until I tried to install the Ubuntu Studio packages through the repository. While everything seemingly works, the boot/usplash screens are all weird and messed up. Tried to fix the usplash problems, but ended up creating more problems with my graphics card. Eventually I accidentally (I think?) deleted usplash and had no startup!

So here I am, reinstalling Ubuntu 10.04 again. I’m going to give Studio a try one more time and see if I can get around that nasty shutdown/usplash screen and get the default back at least.

And yes, I’ve been up for quite a while. Tried sleeping earlier but ended up tossing and turning too much to stay asleep. Yay sickness-induced insomnia!

Oh, did I also mention Brendan was sick over the weekend too? It was pretty bad.

If people didn’t know already, I’m living in DC/Maryland again this summer. This time I’m alone in a basement of a fairly nice house in Takoma – it’s been renovated to be more or less like an apartment. It’s pretty sweet, minus all the bugs (which I can’t avoid no matter where I go).

So these are my plans for the summer:

• Try to wake up by 7am every weekday, by 10am on weekends (so far this has failed…).
• Work office hours (9am-5pm) every weekday to earn some money!
• Bike ride a lot!
• Explore Silver Spring on bike.
• Make my place suitable for living (aka. unpack and clean up the cobwebs…).
• Spend time with Brendan.
• Cook more meals.
• Make a new design!
• Possibly switch to Habari in the process of making a new design.
• Record more solo songs.
• Play Starcraft 2 Beta until it goes retail.
• Play any other games I’ve bought a while back and need to start and/or complete (i.e.: Persona 3 FES, Persona 4, Suikoden Tierkreis, Suikoden IV, Suikoden Tactics, etc).

My class schedule for next year is still a bit wonky, as I haven’t gotten that independent study approved yet. Life’s been pretty good otherwise; Brendan and a few of my friends are graduating this Saturday since they’re seniors, and it feels a bit lonely now.

It’s a bit scary thinking about senior year, as I still haven’t come up with a plan for my senior project that will actually work. All my ideas are kind of lame and web-based showing, as opposed to something you’d want to display as an actual artwork in an exhibit. It’s hard trying to switch to that mentality. Hopefully something will come to mind…soon.

Speaking of classes though, I did fairly worse than last semester on grades, so my GPA has dropped to a 3.377. Personally, I don’t care that much as I’m still good for the loans and grants I have, but it’s still slightly sad. Hopefully next year I’ll be able to do better now that I have most of the boring requirements out of the way.

Now it’s winding down to my last year of college. Seniors just signed up for courses today (started at 7:00am on the dot), and so of course I deprived myself of some sleep to do so. Here is the tentative class schedule; I may be taking another independent study this semester, this time in Computer Science, if the Director of the School of Engineering gets back to me sometime before the summer…

Definite classes:

• ART 451 – Senior Studio Art Coordinating Seminar: This is my senior seminar class that I must take. For some reason it’s not letting me sign up for it, so it’s not official, but seeing as we only have seven senior Studio Art majors, it shouldn’t be a problem. Of course, this is for my Studio Art major. This class kind of cut off some of my options for other classes though, ’cause it spans over 3 class meeting times (Mondays and Wednesdays, 12:10pm-2:30pm).
• ENG 312 – Norse Mythology: Although I now have heard mixed reviews about the professor teaching the course…it’s Norse mythology. I always have been interested in Norse mythology, and have been trying to take this course for a while now (but it’s either always full or during a time slot where I have another class I need to take). It meets every Tuesday and Thursday, from 11:10am to 12:25pm. Right after a nice class about ancient gods, I’ll be having lunch! I’m taking it to fulfill my English minor.
• PSY 376 – Cognitive Psychology: Apparently the professor is good (and easy), and I’m taking it with a friend of mine. I’m not so sure how interested I am in cognitive studies, but might as well try it out. It’s an early class on Tuesdays and Thursdays (9:35am-10:50am), but not as early as the Lifespan Development class (8:10am-9:25am) I’m taking this semester so I’m not complaining. This is for my Psychology minor.
• TRS 260 – Christianity and Culture: Eh…the advisor for TRS majors/minors suggested that I take this because the professor is good. I need to a take 200-level Christianity related course in order to fulfill my general requirements for my major. Since I’ve already taken four TRS courses (Confucianism and Taoism falls under elective since it doesn’t fit my remaining TRS requirements), I figured I might as well minor in TRS since I would be forced to take five either way, and just need one more to make a minor (six courses). This one fits in pretty nicely with my schedule, meeting at 11:10am-12:10am every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. It’s a pity that it’s my only Friday class though, but oh well. 300-level courses is where it’s at though…to be honest, I really put off taking a course to fulfill this requirement because the classes that actually fit for that requirement sound so terribly boring. I mean, Introduction to the Old Testament? New Testament? I had to go through all that in grade school/high school. I don’t need a recap in college, thank you very much.

Possible choices:

• CSC 696 – Independent Study: This is all to fulfill a requirement in Natural Sciences. Argh, it’s so frustrating that the most advanced web design related course they have is “Introduction to HTML”. From what one of my friends told me, it was a joke, and probably would’ve been an absolute joke for me to take it. So my supervisor at work and I worked out a proposal to make a more advanced course just for me, which would essentially teach me the programming aspects that I don’t know (ColdFusion, Java, etc). We were going to do it this semester (Spring 2010), but I had another independent study, so it wouldn’t work.
• ART 309 – Introduction to Photography: Now I know that I’ve already taken the Introduction to Digital Photography and Photoshop course, but this is different. This is old-school photography, with the darkroom and all. It’s so exciting! Though, since the Art department doesn’t officially have a professor for this yet, I can’t say that I’m definitely taking it. It’s sad. It meets Tuesdays and Thursdays from 6:35pm to 8:55pm, so I’m not sure how much photography we’d be doing in class, but it’s definitely good conditions for using the darkroom and whatnot. And of course, it hopefully fulfills my concentration in Digital Arts. I’m not too sure about that though…my advisor never made it really clear…
• ART 303 – Painting I: This is a maybe. I may take this if I can’t get into the Photography class, I may take this even if I do. This depends slightly on whether or not I get the Computer Science (CSC) independent study course that I want. This may or may not help me with my senior project, seeing as I still don’t really know what I want to do. We’ll see. It meets right after my senior seminar class (Mondays and Wednesdays 3:10pm – 5:30pm), so that would be kinda bad in terms of work hours.
• ART 360 – Sculptural Self Portraits: Again, like the Painting I class, this is a “maybe” class. Depends on the Photography class mostly, as it meets at the same time as the Photography class.
• PSY 226 – Close Interpersonal Relationships: I signed up for this, but I’m not sure if I’ll actually take it. I was kind of interested in it, but now I feel like it’s not as interesting as I made it out to be in my head. It would be an easy class, but it also divided up my Tuesday/Thursday afternoons weirdly (it meets from 2:10pm to 3:25pm) so I wouldn’t be able to work as many hours if I took it.

There were a few other Psychology classes I considered, such as Psychology of Terrorism and Forensic Psychology, but the scheduled class times don’t work well for me.

Speaking of Fall ’10, I was able to get the housing I wanted off-campus. It’s technically an apartment in someone’s basement, but they just call it a room in their house. It’s so nice though and I’m so glad I was able to get it, because it’s only $650 per month, all utilities included (cable, internet, electricity, heat, water, etc). It’s a fully furnished room, and in the “hallway” area of the basement, there’s a kitchen – refrigerator, kitchen sink, stove/oven combination all included. The only thing not included is the microwave, but hell – I already have one! There’s also a washer/dryer combination near the bathroom (which I can get to through the hallway), and it’s my own private set. I’ve worked out the pricing, and if I max out on transportation costs (always going back and forth during peak hours, which I probably wouldn’t), then I still save a good couple hundred each month. I start living here in the summer (so after finals), since I’ll be working on campus again over the summer break.

Katsucon. A bit late to be talking about Katsucon 16, but who cares! It was amazingly fun! The maid cafe went (more or less) well, and luckily I had none of the “bad” customers. My poor friend had a drunken table and handled it pretty well, from what others have said in comments. Other than that, I don’t think we really had to escort anyone out of the cafe itself! Yay for behaved otakus! The panels I was able to go see were pretty interesting too; they had one on Vocaloids! There were a lot of things that could be improved, but hopefully they learned from this year and will work on it next year! Oh, and it was at the Gaylord National Harbor Hotel! It’s such a sweet, expensive, and beautiful place! Stressing on expensive though…it was hard to find a cheap meal anywhere!

Apartment hunting. So it’s apartment-hunting time, only this time I’m all alone on it. I’ve looked into one place in particular so far, which is a “room in the house” type of setup, and it’s really nice, not too far metro-wise, and cheap. The people are friendly too – one of them is a long-time worker on campus in the Construction and Planning department. It’s going to be an arrangement until the end of next year (aka. when I graduate), so…my original plan of living with a friend went flop because her mom doesn’t want to do that. Let’s hope for the best!

Spring break. It’s spring break! So I’ve been playing games and NOT doing the work I should be doing for classes. Hah fun!

Time Hollow. Remember the Nintendo DS game I bought a while back? I finally played through it once. It was interesting – what you chose in the very beginning strongly affected the path you took for the rest of the game. That being said, the rest of the game wasn’t as dynamic as that – once that path was chosen, you were kind of stuck on that path. It wasn’t bad, but it’s not a game that I would play through over and over and over to see the many endings I could get…as I don’t think there are that many to begin with.

Shin Megami Tensei: Imagine Online. Just started playing this MMORPG – it’s pretty fun. It’s like a mixture of an actual RPG (with cutscenes and a specific story plot that you must follow) and an MMORPG, where you battle with friends and have side quests and whatnot. I like it so far – people have been extremely friendly and helping me learn the game, which I find somewhat rare in a lot of MMORPGs I used to play. Plus, it’s based off of Persona. Gotta love it.

Persona 3. I bought Persona 3 for the Playstation 2 the other day, which also came with Persona 3: FES, the “add-on” game. The only reason it came with it is because the used copy I was buying didn’t come with the soundtrack it was supposed to, and we (the store employee and I) had no clue what FES was. So she threw it in for me in case it was the soundtrack – but turned out to be another game. Pretty nice overall though. So far it’s been pretty straightforward – cut scenes and automatically following other characters. Supposedly the place where I stopped playing is where the real action and choice-making begins, so I’m looking forward to picking it back up when I get the chance.

Suikoden Tactics. Also bought Suikoden Tactics, but haven’t played it yet. I’m looking forward to it though!

Skate or Die 2. My boyfriend and I were playing the original Nintendo game of Skate or Die 2 last night. For the ramp mini-game that’s in it (not the main storyline), we were making the high scores over and over…kind of. The highest we made was around 66k, and then next one down was 65k (both by me). That’s around 4-5th place on the actual high score list for the game, but apparently better than 3rd place on the Twin Galaxies scoreboard. That kind of made me happy. One day we’ll actually videotape our runs and try to get on Twin Galaxies! But for now, we just took a picture of the screen near the end of the night…though he has the picture at home.