Morning Misadventures

I have to admit that I live in a pretty nice dorm on campus. Its probably one of the best, it seems more like a hotel and less like a dorm. Although once you get into the rooms they are not as nice, being that they are incredibly small (thanks to my roommate though for being a good student and a scoring us the biggest room in the suite) . However, sometimes I think we have to pay for these luxuries. Examples:

• Yes, the cost of living in this dorm is substantially higher than other dorms on campus, but it is so worth it
• The first week of classes there was a problem with the fans in our suite and there was this annoying high pitched buzzing sound. We assumed the whole hall was this way until a hall meeting when we found out it was just out suite...
• Last week our bathroom drain had something happen to it and our whole shower room + half of the hallway flooded (my room included)
• Also last week, one of my suite mates put a piece of pizza into the microwave to reheat it and lo-and-behold, the microwave caught on fire! Smoke filled our suite and most of the floor (surprisingly the fire alarms did not go off...)
  
• And the other day a pipe burst in the basement setting off the fire alarms at 9 am (now usually I am up by then, but no it has to be when I think I am catching a cold and am sleeping in due to the fact that I feel like crap)
• Also, the washing machines suck.

So I think I can successfully say that my dorm is cursed, or maybe its just my suite... Either way, I still love living there. My suite mates are pretty awesome, except when they "bear bottom fart" on my pillows. But that's another story.

Other than that, not much has gone on. I recently spent three weeks trying to get HP to fix my computer, and just this Tuesday did I get it back. It took them about two weeks to ship the stupid box to us, and then once we got that it was just another two days for them to fix it and ship it back. My favorite part is that we had been calling HP to see the status of this magic box for about a week and so one day last week a lady calls me (while I'm in class of course) and leaves a message saying that she is doing everything she can to get the box sent and she is talking to people below her, and just reassured me that the box was going to get there. Then a few hours later I get a call from my dad saying they just got the box at my house and he was shipping it to HP that day... It was quite confusing and instilled a lot of confidence in HP and their upper management.

Well, that was about the extent of my excitement from the last few weeks. Almost flooding my building, and then almost burning it down, and getting my laptop back was about it. Oh yea, and I've been kinda emo, but no one ever wants to hear about that, right?
I thought so.

I highly recommend WinCo made Pizzas, delicious

Well, here I am again, sitting at work, bored out of my mind. Seeing as it is Sunday, there are less people in the lab then there normally are (meaning there's three people here and two are employees). Now I do have things I could be working on, I could be reading Death and the King's Horsemen for my theater class or writing a lab report for physics. But the play, well its just crazy and makes too little sense for me to try and understand it now, while I am incredibly tired. And the physics lab, well who wants to ruin a perfectly good Sunday with physics?

So I decided to sit down and write a blog. But as soon as I opened the browser I drew a blank. I realized that absolutely nothing exciting has gone on this last week. I mean nothing. Well, ok, I guess last night was pretty exciting, but its one of those "you had to be there" things. See I went to WinCo last night to get some ingredients for some magical soup/slow cooker recipe. Now WinCo trips can be pretty fun, as anyone will tell you, especially if they take place after 11pm. So we ran around WinCo for a while, and walked up and down the soup isle about 20 times looking for different things. And after wards we went to Hastings and bought Soul Caliber IV (which I then got my butt kicked at later that night).

Other than that, I spent most of yesterday alone in my suite. It was crazy, for most of the day none of my roommates were home. Very spooky. And, you would think with all that free time that I would get a lot of work done. But no, I was too easily distracted. So today is homework day, except that I don't want to work on anything. Quite a predicament I must say.

But yes, other than my exciting excursion to WinCo, very little has been going on. And now I will apologize for how boring and un-exciting the last few of my blogs have been. I have been trying to update more often, but there just has been nothing exciting to post about. Thus you get the crap like this blog.

So I will leave you at that, and wish you a more exciting Sunday than me. In an hour I'm off to go eat some yummy onion stew!

I think my calc grade is inversly proportional to my physics grade

Yes, as I get better scores in Calc3, I continually get worse scores in Physics... For example, I ace the Calc midterm, I completely forget to do a physics lab. Fail.

Anyway, I guess I lied when I said my computer was all happy with Linux on it. Ok, well it was happy with the Linux part, but it was still angry about something else. Well what prompted the swtich was that I was managing to get a blue screen of death about 10 seconds after booting. Yes, I am so good as messing up computers that I have gotten a blue screen of death using vista... Anyway, a few days after that, it didn't want to start at all. The power light would come on and the fans would be running, but the screen was blank. So, being the internet sleuth I am, I dug around and found out that this was quite a common error with the model of HP laptop that I bought. And apprently (even though my warranty was expired) HP still was paying to replace the motherboards of all the laptops with this problem. Sweet! So I didn't have to pay a penny to get it fixed.

So Tuesday before last I drove down to senic Colfax and gave my father my laptop and he gave me my old one. Now when I say old, I mean really old, like 2002 old. It brought back some good memories, seeing that all my old files were on this from when I was in high school. It still had windows XP and was surprising up to date. I guess my mother had been using it for email and such. It was actually easier to hook up to the ethernet here on campus than my newer laptop. Yes, sadly, it does not even have a wireless card. But its ok, it manages to surf the web and play music decently. Even though I am going through a bit of withdrawl from my iTunes. This computer seems to be lacking in the music department.

The other frustrating part is MSDN. They are the organization that the school gets free software from. But unfortunately, you're only allowed to download this software once. So, that leaves me unable to download the program I need for my comp. science class. I love spending 6 hours in the campus computer labs trying to write code. Its my favorite... What's even worse though, is that the box that HP is sending to get my laptop in, is coming from Texas, where there is a hurricane. So I think I will have to survive for a few more weeks without my prescious laptop.

Other than that, not much has been going on in my life. So I will spare you the boring details. There has been an extreme lack of misadventures sadly, unless you count leaving your favorite scarf at the Pita Pit... Oh and when I bought a sandwich today, a guy from my theatre class made it, the whole time having a silly Italian accent, that was midly entertaining.

Well, seeing as I am incredibly tired, and sitting here at work in the incredibly quiet and empty computer lab, I will leave you at that.

Cheers,
Samantha

"Linux makes everything sexy"

So recently my computer bit the dust. At first I wasn't really sure what the problem was. Maybe the battery was going because it never seemed to start on battery power, but then why did it sometimes not start on AC power? Maybe when windows tried to update the BIOS it flashed it wrong, and now I need a new BIOS? After several weeks of confusion and too many blue screens of death from vista I came to the conclusion that windows sucks and it ate my BIOS. So, I got an image of Ubuntu and booted from a CD. Now able to access all my files (instead of windows crashing after 30 seconds of running) I moved them all to an external hard drive and made the move.

During a late night earlier this week I managed to get Ubuntu installed on my laptop. Many of my close friends had been telling me the wonders of it, and I had always been a bit curious about linux. So, in the heat of being furious with windows, it was the only option

Now my computer is looking very sexy and is quite happy running Ubuntu. In fact, I think it runs better on linux than it ever did on windows. Vista managed to always eat up all my ram and slowed down my laptop incredibly. Now, even when I run windows XP inside of linux, it runs 100 times faster than with just vista.

And other agree, that Linux does do many things better than Windows, in fact, one person even went and wrote down 10 things linux does better than windows, see for your self:

If you tallied up the strengths and weaknesses of Linux and Windows, which OS would come out ahead? According to Jack Wallen, superiority in security, flexibility, interoperability, community, and command-line power (among other things) put Linux well ahead. (from techrepublic.com)

While there are still some bugs, and it freezes every now and then, overall, I think the move was a good idea. Even though the BIOS is still mad at me. While I still don't know all the ins and outs of linux, luckily I know someone who does, so things are working out pretty good. The only downside is that I miss my iTunes...

BUT! What prompted this rant, other than my frustration at windows and excitement over linux, was that I was catching up on reading Penny Arcade and came across one that I think describes my problem.... (as seen here)

I think maybe I "project some kind of goddamn feild" that messes up any computer I touch. Anyway, that was about the excitement of my week (that is blog-worthy), staying up 'till 3 am installing linux, yea thats just how cool I am.