Anglophone rage, an adventure in coordination, FINALLY NO MORE HAGGIS, laptops, gaming, and Friday.

To this day I don't understand why Canada has to be bilingual. We English speakers make up most of the population of this country. Francophones are just the vocal minority.
Course, I'm probably just a wee bit pissed because I'm thoroughly mono-linguistic (although I admit I have designs on being fluent in Sindarin, not that that's particularly widely spoken) and I just had to make a warranty call to somewhere in Quebec. It irritates me when I'm clearly speaking accent-free English and I can hear the lady I'm talking to speaking in French to her co-worker without shame. Dude. I'm right here. I can hear you - and I can't understand you. It's incredibly rude, in my opinion.

Last night I hung out with some friends. We had tacos on the porch and played darts and pool, and the six-pack of Lonetree cider I brought disappeared very quickly, most of it not down my throat. I failed epically at darts, but actually did surprisingly well at pool - it was girls vs guys, and we would have won except I accidentally potted the white while trying to get the eight-ball out. At the end of the night, I grabbed three cans and a bottle, two things in each hand, to carry upstairs. At that moment, a pool cue fell, so I caught it. Picture this: left hand, a can held by my thumb and index, and a bottle between my index and middle fingers; and right hand, from thumb to ring finger, similarly holding two cans and a pool cue. So far so good. So I went to put the pool cue back in the stand, and just as I managed to get it to clip into the bit at the top, one of the cans fell out of my right hand and bounced smack off the top of my head. Moral of the story: put down the bottle and cans before you try to do anything involving hand-eye-coordination. Although, it was pretty funny timing.

Also, because you care so much, this is the end of the Saga of the Haggis: I ate the last of it for lunch today.
I just have to laugh at all the people who get all grossed out by the fact that I'm eating haggis. It's really not as gross as you'd think, I swear!

I have a laptop at work today that I'm supposed to image with a specific image - and it refuses to take it. Dammit Toshiba why?! I've tried at least five different ways of getting it to image, and it just refuses. At the moment I've got it on my lap instead of the desk behind me, so I can keep a closer eye on it, and hopefully see what it is that's breaking so badly. Aaaaand nope. It still broke. WHY.

On the subject of laptops, I installed Steam on mine this morning before work, and started it downloading Portal. Hell yeah. It was about 40% when I left. I have yet to upgrade the RAM in it, but that will happen before I start playing. And on the subject of gaming, I'm definitely going to go out and get an HDMI adaptor for the monitor I bought so that I can use my OUYA with it. Who needs a TV?

Happy Friday, everyone.

Toodles.

Is it really only Thursday?

So for the new laptop I went with Ubuntu 13.04, because I'm used to Ubuntu, overly pretty or otherwise. I had some fun trying to get it installed though. My mother has my 4gb flash drive in her possession because I'm playing her Doctor Who dealer, and I only have a 1gb one otherwise, and the iso once applied to a flash drive takes 2gb, and I didn't have any writable CDs or DVDs that were compatible with the CD drive in the old laptop. This made my life difficult until I found a 2gb microSD card. So I currently have a card as big as my thumbnail loaded up with Ubuntu, fully bootable. Which seems really bizarre to me, because it's so damn tiny. (I should totally try to boot my phone from it. Then again, maybe not.)
Anyhow, spent some time setting that up, and then got it into my bedroom and hooked it up to the secondary monitor that I bought, and watched Torchwood on the monitor while still having facebook open on the main laptop screen. Damn, new shiny stuff is awesome. Heh. I did find out that the new lappy only has 2gb of RAM, so assuming they're the same type, I'll definitely be boosting that out of the old one.

And yes, I had haggis for dinner last night. Cooked it up with 3 sweet potatoes, sliced up, and half an onion, all in the oven together with some rosemary on top. Hit the spot, it did. And had leftovers for lunch today, and probably enough left for lunch tomorrow too. At $8 for one haggis, that works out to 2-something a meal (not counting the sweet potatoes), which is a pretty good deal. Cheaper than eating out, anyway. And tasty. Nom nom nom. I think I weirded out my boss by appreciating haggis. Oh well, more for me.

Didn't get much cleaning done, because of the computer taking pretty long to set up - nor did I get my hair recoloured. But that's okay. I can get some cleaning done today after work, maybe - and definitely Friday after work too. Thankfully, the hair thing (as I said yesterday) isn't imperative - so that could wait til Monday, or even longer, if I wanted. We'll see how it goes.

At work my boss and I set up a computer with two monitors, which is fairly standard, but we also had to put a second keyboard and mouse on it. Hilarity ensued: I'd go to right-click on the desktop for settings, and he'd click away so my menu disappeared immediately; or he'd go to log in, but I'd already hit Ctr-Alt-Del and so he'd do it again and thus exit from the login screen. At one point he was moving his mouse left/right, and I was moving my mouse up/down, so it went in a really wonky circle. What is it they say about small things and small minds?

The radio at work played Werewolves of London this afternoon. I can't take that song seriously. I crack up every time I hear it. I want to know how in hell he sang that song with a straight face. Also, I'm getting bloody tired of Skagit Valley Casino radio ads. That and whichever credit union has the stupid jingle about being "in your corner".

Can't wait for Friday, it's been a long busy week so far. Can't wait for next Friday, either - metal show to see! Woohoo!

Anyways, signing off for now.
Toodles.

Edit: formatting ...

In which a lot of stuff happened.

Well. Yesterday was an interesting day.

Last night on my way home from work, my phone decided that the SD card I had had in it for several months was "damaged". When I tried to plug it into my computer, I got a "could not read Superblock" error. Tried all kinds of things, and I think I ended up borking my computer somehow - because gnome now won't load, suddenly. But before I got to that point, I figured I may as well format the SD card, because I wasn't getting that back any time soon - losing me every photo I ever took (luckily all the important ones were on Instagram...) and all the music, so I had to load that back on after, and now I have all my music back. Doesn't save my photos, but that's life...
So back to my poor computer.
Lucky me, a year and a half ago, I decided to make a bootable USB of Ubuntu 12-something, or possibly 11.10, I'm not quite sure which, but it doesn't matter really, the point being that I got my computer to boot off the flash drive - and it happily loads up the hard drive as an external drive, so I can still get to all my files, yay!
BUT, unluckily, the password for the wifi at my house is stored under my regular profile, and I can't access it from the external boot, nor can I get it out of the wifi settings on my phone, it's all hidden and stuff.
BUT, luckily again, I rooted my phone. So I googled (from my phone) on how to access the wifi password file, opened a terminal window on my phone (because I have one of those - finally it comes in handy!) and did this:
$ su
# cat /system/etc/wifi/wpa_supplicant.conf
and scrolled through to find the one I wanted. So now I have the wifi password, so I can access the internet from my poor borked laptop.

Fortunately, without the external boot, I can still log into the command line (it's just gnome that's not working), so I suspect the next thing I will have to do is figure out how to log into the wifi from the command line (shouldn't be too difficult, right?) and run a proper update (did I mention I'm still running Ubuntu 11.04?) on my computer, so it should then overwrite the borked files and still keep all my data. Hopefully.

So all that happened, and then I check facebook from my phone and find that my dear parents got in an accident while they were across the border for their 25th anniversary, and while they're fine, the car is totalled. *sadface*

And then on top of all that, UFV got my first cheque. Because I'm working a co-op, it's technically a 6-credit course, meaning I have to pay for it. I got paid for 7 or so days of work (first cheque, it's always the way of it), so I got 690-something deposited into the bank yesterday morning. All well and good. 40 went straight to my cellphone bill (because I haven't paid that in ... well ... a little while - I just haven't had the money) leaving me with 650-odd. Fine. I went to UFV after work yesterday to register and pay, and found that the cost of the co-op is 629.76. Fuck.
I wish they had some kind of deal such that the employer would take a portion out of each of my paycheques and just send it straight to UFV, thus spreading that 630 over the course of four months, rather than a lump sum directly after the end of the last semester when my money's running thin anyways. Thank God my landlords are gracious and will wait til my next cheque to take rent out, and thank God I have a wonderful friend who's buying me groceries today - but not everyone has that. It's stupid, in my opinion, that they don't have such an arrangement.

Yeah. Life has been interesting.

Also, a quick note pursuant to yesterday's warning of long and different blog posts coming:
apparently 1 & 2 Tim and Titus are very possibly (indeed, very probably) not Pauline epistles. This blew my mind, and makes my argument even stronger. See: http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/goodspeed/ch21.html.
Yes, I will be blogging about the Bible and Stuff and Things... I warned you it would be different.

So that's it for today.
Toodles.

Happy Monday

So I haven't written a post yet today; I suppose I ought to do that. For SCIENCE .... or something.

It won't be nearly as clever as a sonnet, nor nearly as full of content as the one I did when I came back to this blog, but that's mostly because I had no new revolutionary ideas over the weekend.

I did have a Nerf-gun fight with some friends on Saturday, it was my friend's birthday and he likes to throw Nerf-day parties. Basically we ran around in a park with lots of brightly coloured guns and foam swords, and lost a metric ton of little Nerf darts. It was fairly entertaining.
On Saturday, also, I watched the most recent Doctor Who episode. Besides the bratty kid and her brother, it was a damn good episode - I love Matt Smith's schizophrenic Doctor so very much! I am seriously looking forward to the next episode. Oh man. The one thing I am not looking forward to about next week is that it's the fricken season finale. *sadface* (Note to self: look up "He Said, She Said", the prequel to next week's ep, on youtube.)

I also had a rather wee, somewhat banal, but slightly euphoric epiphany this evening; I live in my own damn house.
I realise that's obvious to most of you, but one of the implications of that concept is that because it's my own damn house, if I feel like moving my pillows and my blanket to the couch and camping in the living room with a movie (or reddit) on my computer on my lap, I can do that. I could even sleep on the freaking couch if I want to. The only reason I haven't, is that old habits die hard (thanks, Mom).
So I'm happily camped under my blanket with a cup of chai tea poured from my charming TARDIS teapot. Because I can. Wheeee!

And that's all for now, folks.

(Did I really just say that? Oh dear. Next thing you know, I'll be saying YOLO...)

Anyhow -

Toodles!

never fear! i've returned!

so i got asked recently why i haven't blogged in a while. "had i run out of things to say?"

no, but i have a great excuse!

my lappy, my lovely christmas lappy that my dad put together for me, decided, suddenly, that life was not worth living any more, and shuffled off its mortal coil, ran down the curtain and joined the bleedin' choir invisible! it became an ex-laptop! ... er. i mean ... the motherboard died.

so i purchased this:

it's a thinkpad t61p, and it's fantastic. yes, used. can't afford new. but it works great anyways.

unfortunately, ubuntu won't recognise the built-in webcam, nor does it currently recognise the ever so cool fingerprint reader - though i think there may be some software for it; i'm looking into that as we speak. if it doesn't work, well, it's really kind of non-essential, but it would be neat if it did work.

ah well. the small things we sacrifice for a slice of natty narwhal awesome.

in other news, i'm starting school for reals in september - i'm taking the CIS (computer information systems) diploma. heh. computers.

anyhow. that's all i got for now - but i'll be back! and in larger numbers! ... never mind.

edit: my bad, thinkpads don't have built in webcams. whoops.