Sick

I skipped all of my classes today and am skipping seminar for three nested reasons:

1.  I feel like crap and getting vertical makes me cough more and my head feel even worse.  

2.  I would not get anything out of going to class.

3.  I really don't want to be That Guy who shows up to class sick, coughing and sneezing all over, and at best annoys their classmates (at worst, you share your lovely little plague).

I'm off to continue huddling under the blankets, a thermos of tea and a box of tissues next to me.

Sick

I skipped all of my classes today and am skipping seminar for three nested reasons:

1.  I feel like crap and getting vertical makes me cough more and my head feel even worse.  

2.  I would not get anything out of going to class.

3.  I really don't want to be That Guy who shows up to class sick, coughing and sneezing all over, and at best annoys their classmates (at worst, you share your lovely little plague).

I'm off to continue huddling under the blankets, a thermos of tea and a box of tissues next to me.

Urgh

Is it possible for my body to get sick from a sudden increase in vitamin intake?  Because I've remembered to take a daily multivitamin every day this week, and now I'm getting a cold.  I thought vitamins were supposed to prevent that...

Dear vitamin-pill manufacturers

 Okay, I'm buying into your marketing, trying to be healthy, and trying to take a daily multivitamin.  I'm a vegetarian and don't eat much dairy, nor for that matter other things found in nature, so I figure that it won't do any harm.  Mature of me, right?  

But come on, is it too much to ask for a pill that is smaller than my thumb?  Seriously, even the brand-name ones - which cost me eight bucks for sixty tablets - are ridiculously huge.  They're nearly two inches long.  I'm sure you guys have some ridiculous advertising budget, how about shuttling some of that money into making more compact pills?  

And for that matter, do I really freaking need 200% of the recommended daily dose of vitamin D?

*sigh*

Well.  There's now no one left for me to vote for come November.  

Obama, Clinton, Edwards...black man, white woman, white man, but there's really not a damn meaningful difference between them.

I hate American politics.

I blame the Thetans

According to Google, 'Tom Cruise' is 'Heath Ledger' in Spanish.  

Seriously, go to translate.google.com and try it.  I...really don't understand how such a thing happens.

Good news for New Jersey!

Of 32 major US airports, Salt Lake City apparently is best with around an 85% on-time departure rate.  

Of the airports surrounding my fine home state of New Jersey, the highest-ranking airport within a reasonable distance is Baltimore, with about 77% on-time.  JFK, LaGuardia, Philadelphia, and Newark come in at 76, 74, 72, and 72, respectively.  

So pretty much unless you want to go all the way down to Baltimore to catch a flight, you're screwed if you want to get out of New Jersey.  They charge you money to drive out of the state, and there's no reliable air transportation.  

Note to self:

Shopping lists are great, but work best if you look at them while in the store.

Aaaaah!

My reaction upon watching the BBC's Planet Earth episode about shallow seas:

Aaaaaaaah!  *fearful gibberish*  Aah aah aaah ah!  *more gibberish*  Aaaaah!  

Excuse me, I'm off to go quiver under the blankets and chant over and over that I'm very very far from any freakishly horrific sea creatures.

In other news...

Our economy has truly gone to hell.  

I have no idea what any of this means, but I do know it's quite Not Good.

A shocking experience!

In lab class today, we got to play with electricity and magnets!

One of the toys we played with was a thing that I'm sure has a name, used to charge up Leyden jars (which are a whole new type of awesome).  It was a contraption with two adjacent, parallel wheels mounted vertically, each embedded with magnets of opposite polarity.  You turn a crank, the magnets do their thing, a little brush collects the charge and funnels it into a Leyden jar.  Already neat (seriously, Leyden jars are mind-boggling.  You can store electricity in a piece of plastic.  Take it apart and it's fine.  Reassemble it, touch both metal parts at once, and shock!  It's like reassemble-able electricity.)

So, what we did, in the name of science and class unity, was get one of the jars really charged up.  Then we all - all twelve or so of us - held hands, other than the two people who held the jar.  The instant that the second hand touched the second part of the jar, we all collectively flinched or cried out, because you could feel a spasm of electricity going through your wrists/hands.  It was really ridiculously cool.  

Party at Google's house!

One of those few internet videos that is well worth your two minutes or so.  http://www.cracked.com/article_15825_internet-party-what-happens-when-googles-parents-leave-town-for-weekend.html

Windows OS X

Today I fired up the Boot Camp Assistant in OS X, and within an hour had Windows XP installed on my computer.  That's neat, and it was incredibly easy.  There also were no problems in activating XP, which I was afraid there might be, for reasons untold.  So, if there's some bizarre reason why I absolutely must used Word or Excel or something in the future, I'm set.  Plus, I don't lose the two bits of software I've ever actually paid money for.  One is just a nice little puzzle game I like.  

The other is a nice little program that runs in the background and basically unlocks DVDs you put in: it somehow makes whatever region code irrelevant, and it also re-allows any 'User Operation Prohibitions'.  You know how when you play a DVD, it more often than not forces you to sit and watch through the FBI warning and studio logos or whatever crap?  This, using a combination of pixie dust and unicorn hair, undoes those prohibitions, and it makes me thrilled.  They've since raised the prices, but I would still highly, highly recommend AnyDVD from Slysoft.  

Whether or not it's legal here in the US is really, in my eyes, utterly irrelevant.  I legally purchased a DVD, and I legally purchased a device that advertises itself as able to play DVDs.  For the big companies involved to tell me that I can't use those two legally purchased items together for my own private amusement is really unjustifiable.  

Anyway, so OS X will be my 'native' region, if only because I've got more R1 discs.  If I want to watch a R2 movie, I'll just pop over to Windows and watch it there.  

Have I mentioned that I absolutely love love love my new computer?

New toy!

Oh my goodness, I can type in Blogger, at whatever speed I want, and not have my computer freeze up on me!  It's glorious, and powered by a new MacBook.  

It's going to take some getting used to, but I'm happy with the choice.  I absolutely adore Leopard so far.  I think one of the fundamental differences between Windows and OS X is the interconnectivity.  Windows seems like more of simply a tool to launch other programs which exist and run very separately from each other.  OS X, on the other hand, seems to act like more of a uniter.  You can keep things running-ish in the background.  As someone who is generally listening to music whenever I'm at my computer, I really like the way iTunes is so integrated.  I also am enjoying not having a whole slew of crap on the desktop.  Of course, the no-right-click thing with the touchpad is going to take some getting used to,  as is the different keyboard functions and whatnot.  

Overall, though, it's fantastic.  Still to do: see if I can create a partition on my external HD without it deleting everything, so I can use Time Machine to automatically backup onto that; figure out how to do the whole Boot Camp thing so I can can revisit Windows if needed.

Oh, poo

Apparently, Richardson's out.

*sigh*. So, Obama it is, then. The least-crappy of a bunch of middle-of-the-road, all-talk-no-walk, so-bland-it-burns craptastic candidates.

Wait, who?

John McCain? Seriously, what is that about, New Hampshire? I can understand how Clinton won - I may not like her, but I understand that she's been at the front of the pack. But John friggin McCain? Where the hell does that come from?

Also, 5% for Richardson. Hooray.

Dear Politicians:

Yes, we get it. You are going to change things. You're bristling with hope and want us to share in your starry-eyed optimism, which, considering that you all have some significant political experience, is clearly a facade. But we get it. Change is good, you are change, therefore you are good.

Can you please talk about actual issues now? Real, quantifiable, political decisions rather than wishy-washy, feel-good nonsense?

I appreciate it, thanks.

--A Voter

Exclamation!

I just ordered a MacBook. I am happy about this.

Part of me, however, despite splitting the cost 50/50 with my parents, is freaking out over the rather large amount of money. But thinking about a shiny new mac compared to a very old, somewhat bulky Dell is happy-causing.

The Great White Nothing

Today is the day when one of the most frighteningly homogeneous states gathers and, in a process that in no way resembles anything remotely sensible, decides who should be the presidential candidates that the rest of America will take seriously.

Amongst the many, many flaws in this system, my favorite is this: why the hell do we let Iowa make such important decisions? The majority of Iowa is white and they don't exactly give an accurate demographic representation of America. But beyond that, the concerns of Iowans are probably significantly different from those who live in non-farmland. I put far more weight on immigration issues, gun control, and foreign policy, while I imagine that farming subsidies and ethanol nonsense is more important to those whose state depends on growing corn.

Bah humbug, I say.

In other news, yesterday I freed up about 30gb on my external hd. How? Deleted the many many duplicate mp3s living there. Backup is good, but triple redundant files on the same drive is just a waste of space.