Why'd the Boy Throw the Clock Out the Window?

So he could see time fly! Heh get it, he threw the clock, flying time... ok, I thought it was funny.

Well, its been a while hasn't it? Sadly I have been just swamped with homework and projects these last couple of weeks. All of my professors decided to put things off until the last minute and were cramming to get a bunch of projects in before Thanksgiving break. Although I am pretty proud of myself, I managed to write two 6 page papers in the course of one week. I'd have to say though, the paper on Vikings was much more exciting than my theatre paper.

So this last week was a lot of fun, but went by way too fast. (I think it has something to do with that warped reality thing) But it was great, I got to see all my old buddies, saw a couple of movies, and ate a ton of delicious food. My sister is studying to become a chef, so our Thanksgiving was pretty spectacular, and for a late birthday present, she made me a New York style cheesecake. Oh my goodness, she can make the best cheesecakes ever! It was just right, and luckily I snagged the leftovers and brought them back to school with me.

So far this semester I haven't really had the chance to see many movies, but I made up for it over the break and managed to see 4 new movies. On Saturday I think, I went to see Twilight with my best bud. She was the one who originally got me to read the books, so it was kind of exciting. We got to the theatre and there was a gaggle of highschool girls sitting in the first few rows, so we went up and sat towards the back in front of the only two guys in the theatre. Now I wanted to like this movie, really I did, the books were my guilty pleasure in high school. But sadly this movie was "epic fail" literally. It was just terrible. You could tell they were trying, but for me, they just picked the wrong guy to play the lead. You could tell that every time he spoke he was trying too hard to sound like an american. In the end it just didn't do it for me. So I gave up and just laughed through the whole thing, I couldn't help it. But somehow I don't think the girl sitting next to me appreciated it, I got a lot of "shh's". But I don't we were the only ones who didn't like it, the guys sitting behind us were laughing just a much. It actually made the movie pretty fun.

Now to make up for such a bad movie, on Monday my dad and I went and saw the new James Bond movie. Now I grew up watching the old Bond films with my dad, so this was a trip down memory lane, and was a lot of fun. I really liked the film, to me it seemed like it went back to the older Bond films. True there was a lot of action sequences, maybe too much for me, and sometimes they were hard to follow, but they were still impressive. I think I might have liked Quantum of Solace more than Casino Royale.

The other two movies we rented on DVD. The first, The Journey to the Center of the Earth was not nearly as entertaining without the 3D glasses. In fact, it wasn'at that great of a movie especially with all the characters randomly pointing things at the screen for no reason at all... The other was 88 Minutes, which seemed exciting being set in Seattle, but really ended up being 140 minutes too long. It was one of those movies where there was lots of action, but nothing ever really happened. And I didn't really care if any of the characters survived becuase they were all terrible people, and pretty much just jerks.

Other than watching movies, I got to see all my old friends who are at CBC, which was great. And when we went to Shari's at Midnight on Friday, we ran into almost all the Drammies. It was crazy. So while the last few weeks have been crazy, the break made up for them and brought a much needed rest before finals. It was strange though, being home, I ended up missing Pullman by the end of the week. While I loved seeing my family and friends, I missed all the freedom I have at school, and not being asked where I'm going at midnight on a Tuesday, or why I didn't come home until 3 am. I definitely enjoy being at school, Christmas break will be interesting.

Dads and, Coffee Tables, and Papers, Oh My!

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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.

What if the voting age were a bit lower?

Hm, as most of you know, I could care less about politics. Most of the time I find it boring and pointless because I am a rebel and know that my vote doesn't really count. However, I did find this amusing article on Cracked.com showing several ads for if the voting age were say lowered to 6. Although I don't usually agree with the Democratic national party, if they used this ad campaign I would so vote for whoever was bold enough to use it!
No, if I really thought about it, although this candidate is obviously amazing, I doubt I would vote for them anyway. (For reasons of my own which I am sure you don't want to hear)

Other than that, I learned today that the Earth is supposedly in a photon belt and thus what we know as time is being warped around us and thus moving much faster than we would normally perceive it. Which is especially inconvenient seeing as I have midterms right now and if anything, more time in the day would be beneficial. But that's the Earth for you, always thinking about itself, doesn't it know that it revolves around me?

As well, my horoscope says that Venus, the planet of love, is in my sign, so for the next few weeks I will be "super-cuddly". So come and get it! :p

What Drugs are Casting Directors on?

Ah, so here I am again, sitting in the Honors Lab on shift, bored out of my mind. Not only am I in the least used lab on campus, but its also 10:30 in the morning. So, out of boredom (and not wanting to do and reading for classes) I wandered over to rotten tomatoes, one of my all time favorite sites. And one article they had this morning really caught my eye, and so I thought I'd share it with you. And yes, this is about actors and the film industry, but this is not really from an entertainment reporter. It is actually a pretty interesting article (so don't judge me)

From TheMovieBlog.com

"We’ve all said this phrase several times about one actor or another: “How on earth does this person keep getting parts in movies!?!?”. Maybe sometimes we see and understand why someone keeps getting parts… hell maybe we even love seeing them, but when it comes down to it we admit to ourselves and others that the person in question is actually talentless and probably doesn’t belong on the big screen."

The article goes on to list 10 actors who truly are not talented at all. I like however, that this article merely ranks these actors on their talent level, not how much people hate them.

"NOW REMEMBER, I’m not talking about the WORST actors. You can have an actor with talent, but they find a way to screw up everything they do. At the same time, you can have someone with no talent at all… but they find a way to not screw something up (I have no talent as a painter, but if you tell me to paint one straight red line on a wall… I can pull that off without too much trouble)."

I like that, its true that while some people have no talent, they are quite good at playing roles that require no talent.

Well, I just found this article entertaining, and since I had not graced this page with my presence in the last few days, I thought I would share it with you. Other than that, not much has happened in my corner of the world that is worth sharing with all 3 of you reading this.

And with that I am off, so I wish you a good Tuesday and a Happy Bi-Sexual Day!

The Misadventures in the Dining Center

Well, before I get to the misadventures, I thought I would share my thoughts on last week's mix. For those of you who don't know, The Daily Evergreen prints a special section of the school newspaper every Thursday called the MiX where they discuss events happening around campus, have movie reviews and other non-news related articles. Anyway, I have been (for some time) in love with the guy who writes the movie reviews. Its a sad obsession, but nonetheless, he is amazing. He has a witty writing style that I appreciate and he has extraordinarily good taste in movies (except maybe for his love of B-horror films). Last week in the MiX he wrote his article about how he wished that production companies would stop doing two things:

1) Remaking classic asian films, and
2) Letting Nicolas Cage keep his job.

I like that he had not seen Nicolas Cage's most recent film "Bangcock Dangerous" but he already said he didn't like it. So as I have said, this obession has been 1 year in the making, and it looks like it will continue on this year.

As for the misadventures, this year me and my amazing roommate have taken residency in a hall that happens to be near to the Hillside dining center. Last year we lived near Stephenson and the newly renovated Soutside dining center. As we have had to eat more often at Hillside, we have come to the conclusion that Southside > Stephenson > Hillside. For one, Southside has an amazing pasta bar that prepares delicious pasta dishes right in front of you, and Stephenson had a station that rotated dishes everyday. These "scary meat products" were usually pretty tasty, and often times we would plan to go to Stephenson in order to get our favorites. Well Hillside lacks both of these, and really the only good thing at Hillside is their sandwiches, which really I could make at home.

But where the real adventure came was on last Friday when we both trekked to the dining center to get dinner at some odd hour, thus there were very few people there. Well my roommate wanted to make the jukebox there play the song "Tainted Love" (seeing that we were sitting next to it, and its free) however, she didn't really know how to use the jukebox, so in trying to flip the pages of the songs, she managed to select a terrifying hord rock veering towards metal song. Now there is a delay after you select a song before it starts to play, so she continued to press buttons several times before the song came on. Once the first song came on, she snuck back to our table, disappointed and discouraged.
After her song had ended, one of the employees there went up to the jukebox to pick the next song. He was one of our favorite employees at Stephenson last year, he would always sing to us while waiting in line at the grill. But he was at Hillside today cleaning tables, and as he was standing in front of the JukeBox trying to pick a song, my roommate's second song choice came on, it was none other than "Opps I did it again" by the ever popular Britney Spears. As soon as her heard the song he immediately stepped away from the machine claiming "I didn't pick this!"
We felt just a little bit sorry for the guy, but it was too funny, so before people could realize that it was my roommate who picked the song, we snuk out the backdoor, just lauhging to ourselves. My reaction was "Out of all the songs on that juke box, you have to randomly pick the one Britney Spears song?!".
We are now determined to at some wee hour of the night and try to figure out the jukebox, preferably when there are not very many people to be witnesses.

In other news, another spammer succeeded in surprising me today. When I checked my email address reserved solely for spam, 0ne of the messages managed to catch my attention. It read something along the lines of "You're AAPR membership needs to be verified". I just laughed for a second before deleting it. I mean, really? Did you even take a second to collect any data on me? Oh well, I guess it will go nicely with all the viagra emails I get...

Another misunderstanding...

So the other day I got a but excited about some news posted on the mtv blog Splashpage. They "reported" that Micheal Caine said Jonny Depp and Philip Seymour Hoffman had been slated as the villians in the next Batman film. Well, I stumbled today upon this little article on the same blog:

From MTV Splashpage

Published by Casey Seijas on Tuesday, September 9, 2008 at 4:00 pm.

Yesterday, we reported that “Dark Knight” castmember Michael Caine claimed that as far as he knew, the villains for the next “Batman” film had been cast with Johnny Depp landing the role of The Riddler, and Philip Seymour Hoffman playing The Penguin. Today at the Toronto Film Festival, we went right to the source and asked Hoffman directly if he indeed had been cast as The Penguin.

“No one has talked to me about it ever — never,” replied Hoffman. “It happened, like, five years ago, too. It was a rumor back then and it’s still a rumor. [laughs] It’s just in the press. It’s funny.”

I think its funny that mtv news has this big article on the rumors about the next batman movie, and then the next day they turn around and go "oops, just kidding". Ugh and I feel worse for getting caught up in what was obviously a rumor... -___-" But oh well, these things happen, that's how people are.