23 September 2002 - 16:34

Been a while since I updated, but nothing exciting to say.

I feel really organized and together. I suspect this may have something to do with not taking very many classes. The house is pretty clean (all 4 of us have good cleaning instincts). My papers are kinda sorted (thanks to a two-drawer filing cabinet that some suburbanite tried to throw out). My on-line data...

Well, my computer died late Saturday night. Fortunately, I have backups. Not neatly scheduled and organized intentional backups. Haphazard, spread out on four or more other peoples' computers, zip disks, and floppy disks backups. And yet, to my utter amazement, after some hours of work yesterday, I've determined that I have copies of all of my data save three very recently created files (big, moderately important, but not unique and irreplacable) and some pictures of water from the internship.

I'm aggressively sorting through this data, trimming it down, organizing it so that I can definitely find everything, and then I'm going to compress it and stick it on both zip disk and CD. Yeah, a little after the fact, but whatever. And maybe, for the first time in about 15 years of computer use, I can finally get a healthy backup schedule going.

Do I really have that much data, you may be asking? Why yes, actually, I do. Probably about a gig, though I won't know for sure until I have it all in one place. Once it's all neatly sorted and stored I'll entertain you (referring, really, to myself) with such fascinating information as the ages of the oldest files, what takes up the most space, and perhaps even some thrilling excerpts from my past.

So yeah. Computer being down sucks, but for the first time in years, it's not the end of the world--not just from a data preservation standpoint, but also from a daily life standpoint. Between my job at the media center and living in a 4-5 computer household, it's all cool.

A more pressing, yet much more explicable and vastly cheaper problem--my rear bicycle tire got bent just to the point where it makes riding an exercise in pain (and bad for the bike), but not quite where it's really obvious when the bike isn't in motion. This is due to impact from a slow moving car, the driver of which didn't notice us (I refer to the bike, "Tree," and myself) despite seeming to look right at us. Don't worry, I'm fine. It happens to pretty much all commuter bicyclists sooner or later--some argue that this is a reason not to bike, whereas I think of it as a reason not to drive. More on that later.

So yeah. Stuff breaks, but it's not going to interfere with anything. Except I might not make it to Mote until I get the bike back.

I have a practical thesis question. It may be much farther on the practical side of the scales than on the interesting side, but if I make sure to collect some basic information, I can always add more complicated questions during the analysis without worrying about whether I'll be able to actually produce something.

(Yes, it will be about dolphins. Duh.)

I'm actually studying for the GREs (all three: general, biology, and psycology).

I'm kinda keeping in touch with my far away friends, or a few important ones and hopefully more soon (if this includes any of you, dear readers, drop me a line). Turquoise has a livejournal page now to replace the blog: http://www.livejournal.com/~turq/

My finances are looking very good. For the first time, I'm pretty secure due partially to my own efforts (instead of exclusively due to parents-parents-parents and scholarships). I'm healthy.

This weekend was quiet. Ryan (unexpectedly) worked Friday night and I stayed at home and moped and studied. We had Saturday off, but everyone else in the world was busy. I limped downtown on my bike. We played computer games. Sunday I attempted some triage with my newly broken computer and then came to work and spent about three or four hours trying to get everything involved in copying data on Hi8 tapes to a computer program. Was (mostly) successful. Stayed up way too late (though not by other students' standards) staring at my laptop in mild shock.

Everything is quiet and calm.

By the by, does anyone know anything about natural or at least non-toxic nail polishes? If so, please e-mail me or leave a note in the guestbook.