In Which: Four More Days, Injury-Prone, Temperature Prevarication, Nerd News.

Monday is almost over - the last Monday at my summer co-op job. After this week, I'm back at university. It's been a really long summer, and it's been a really short summer. I feel like it really wasn't summer at all, except for the bloody heat.
I have sat in an office chair, and I have run around fixing printers. I have imaged computers, and I have wiped computers. I have counted printer pages, and I have swept the floor. I have gotten frustrated with users and computers because Everything is Broken Forever, and I have had the Tech Aura^TM make things magically work (yes, that's a thing. Sort of. It's like the Force. If you have the Tech Aura, all you have to do is look at a computer and it just works).
But this time Friday, I'll be out of here. Feels weird, man.

I did my 5k run on Saturday, with my bestie.
Normally, 5k takes me about 45 minutes. Saturday's run took me 43ish, and that was after walking the last km.
The only reason I walked the last km was that my knees were killing me. Stabbing pain and stuff. My muscles would have been perfectly happy to do the whole damn run, and in (comparatively) very good time, but my joints, my stupid joints. I got across the finish line and then was so mad at my stupid freaking knees that I cried. The First Aid tent people gave me a tensor bandage for the worst knee, and some ice for both. I kept it wrapped all yesterday, and it's still giving me achyness today, so I've got it wrapped again.
Other than that, it was a fun run, in the dark with glowsticks and colourful clothing. So much NEON, my eyes hurt...
And there were two little girls, about 10 and 8, who ran it, and they were troopers. They passed me right at the end. I was vicariously proud of them.

Still trying to figure out the best combination of blankets/window/pajamas to go with the hammock - ideal temperature is hard when you overheat on top and freeze on the bottom. Other than that, I'm still liking it. Because hammock.

In Lizzi's Nerd News, some people on reddit have come up with an idea within the last day: to make a sort of "Usenet 2.0"/"P2Preddit". This was spawned from a thread on a post (on a wart on a frog on a bump on a log... whoops, sorry, got carried away there) on /r/linux about the 22nd anniversary of Linus Torvalds' Usenet post that "started it all".
Another reddit member said this about it:

"An updated usenet wouldn't be a bad thing definitely.
With what else is going on in the world, leaving mass information centralized in the hands of a few government-intertwined corporations probably isn't best for future generations - encryption is a requirement."

Sounds about ideal for my recent tinfoilhattedness. I've signed on to help if I can. Because hey, why not? Plus, if it leaves the ground, it's good to have projects under one's belt when looking for a job. Not that that's my primary motivation - I'm really just interested in the whole thing. So far the noises people are making are in the direction of PGP plus some kind of Web-of-Trust system. So yeah.

That's about it. Toodles.

Summer's almost over....

It's August already. I don't know where this summer has gone. I'll be back at university in a month. Way too fast, if you ask me - I really didn't get a summer this year. Ah well. Working life, I guess.

I've still been watching Supernatural - I'm now exactly halfway through Season 2. It makes me wish I could go "hunting" - taking care of ghosts and stuff that are hanging around being all malicious. I really like the show. Added bonus: Jared Padalecki and Jensen Ackles (Sam and Dean Winchester, in that order) are very very easy on the eyes. Mhm. Especially Jared. I mean, I'm not experiencing an actor-crush, at all... Really! (internal monologue: he's married, Lizzi - he's married, damnit!)
Although I almost can't take the show seriously since I saw W. Pender St. in "Chicago"... Most of their filming is in BC, especially Vancouver, but really.

I'm also (possibly foolishly) toying and/or experimenting with the idea of sleeping in a hammock on a regular basis - apparently it's the latest greatest best sleep thing you can do for yourself? Something about the zero-pressure-points resulting from not lying flat on a bed, makes for less tossing and turning or some such. I have no evidence to the contrary, so I figured, why the hell not? Can't hurt, anyways, and I've had terrible sleep for the last couple months, so it can't get any worse. So I'm currently sewing up a hammock from some nice thick circus-striped cotton I've got lying around (of course I have fabric lying around...!) and building a stand for it so I don't have to put holes in my (rented) walls. I may give up on the stand depending how it goes and just put holes anyways, cos they can, technically, be filled in after, but I'd prefer not to if I don't have to.

Damn, I'm turning into a freaking hippy - kombucha and kefir, toe shoes, no-'poo*, hammocks, organic and paleo food and other products, the list goes on. I blame you and your granola ways, mother mine!

*(shampoo free, for those who've never seen that phrase before.)

I also got my ears pierced again on Saturday. Funny story there. I was walking to the tattoo place to get them done, and stubbed my toe something fierce - and of course I was wearing open-toe sandals. So I'm bleeding all over my sandal and I walk in and ask to be pierced - and would they be able to give me something so I can bandage my toe? So they actually ended up bandaging my toe for me, and then I had my ears pierced right after. First aid from a tattoo shop. Who'd'a thunk it? Anyway, I now have a couple of secondary rings in my ears, so it's now two on each side. I'm really happy with how it looks.

Oh yes, and I'm doing a 5k run in Vancouver - the Radiant Run. It's for charity, and it's at night and full of glowsticks and brightly coloured clothing. I'm going with my friend Jessi. I've been tempted to get more Vibram toe shoes - and given the violently neon nature of most of their running shoes, this might be a good opportunity to splurge a little, since they would match the theme of the night...

Other than that, life as usual is life as usual - although for the next ten days I'll be housesitting for my friend with cats. Hoo boy. Don't get me wrong, I don't hate cats - I just don't like when their fur gets all over bloody well everywhere. Whoever invented lint rollers should have free beer for life.

As a final note, Don't Fear The Reaper is currently playing on the radio. It always makes me think of that SNL skit - but now it also makes me think of the episode "Faith" from Supernatural, the one with the tame Reaper that I was ranting about in my last post. They had the balls to play that song as part of the soundtrack, because Reaper. Hehehe. Anyways... (I'm totally NOT obsessed with that show...)

That's it, toodles all!

Oh help.

Today is the Co-op Site Visit.

That means that someone from UFV's Career Centre comes out to the place I'm working, to discuss me with my supervisors, and then talk to me after. It's like an interview; only it's an interview that affects my grade at university.

My co-worker very kindly gave me a piece of advice - anything they say about me, not to take personally, because it will probably be constructive criticism. As in, they might say less-than-pleasant things.

You know that knot that happens in the pit of your stomach, the terror-fueled adrenaline rush that makes you feel like you want to vomit? Yeah. I have that right now. Not pleasant.

Even worse, I have to come back and sit through the rest of my eight-hour day afterwards. I wish this was over and I could just go home.

Oh the stress.
Toodles.

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.

Working so hard.

Today marks the end of the first week working at my new job.

It’s a co-op job, i.e. co-operative with my university – meaning, I get university credit for it, and I get work experience for my resume, the company I work for gets cheap (that is, cheaper than a regular employee doing the same job) labour for a semester, so they don’t have to commit to hiring me forever, AND I get paid for my time. So it’s pretty much benefits on all sides.

Today I opened and closed my first ticket in the ticketing system – actually, my first ticket ever. Tickets, if you’re unfamiliar with them, are ways of reporting incidents (especially in helpdesk work) in such a manner that it’s easy to see whose the problem is, who’s reporting it, what the problem is, and whom it’s assigned to. You can assign it to someone specific, or to a group, and you can escalate a ticket by assigning it to someone higher up. Theoretically simple. A bit time-consuming in reality. But it gives management a good way to see statistics on what the IT department does and when. It probably took me longer to type in the ticket for the DVD drive replacement I did on Monday than to do the actual replacement, but hey. Just doing my .... job.

My coworkers are good fun – the two of them bicker like siblings. Sometimes it gets a little overwhelming, but I enjoy it most of the time – they do mean well, and there are some good jokes.

And then sometimes one has to deal with Users. Users are a special breed of human being. They don’t always do useful smart things, and in pursuit of making life easier for them, they don’t always make us do things that are useful or smart either. This I have learned after one short week.

But my day is almost over, and then I will go home and watch this week’s episodes of Castle and NCIS, because I went to Bible study last night instead of watching shows.

Toodles, all.

what? twice in one week?

so, um, i'm back?
instead of ... erm ... packing ... which i should be doing on account of i want to move on thursday next ...

the other thing i've been doing instead of packing, is pinning useful things on my pinterest board. i totally ripped off disney's family channel, title-wise, and created a board i called Suite Life, to which i'm pinning things that i plan to use once i move into my new suite. i hate The Suite Life of Zack and Cody, by the way - it's inane and not funny at all - but the pun is amusing, so i don't care that i had to steal it from such a rubbishy sitcom.

also, had to hunt down my t4 from tim hortons in chilliwack - they hadn't sent it to me, even though i gave them my address 3 times; my mom and i had to drive down to chilliwack to pick it up, this week! grrr. i needed it to do my tax return (which i should have done in spring, but for the aforementioned lack of t4), which i needed for my student loan for this semester. here's hoping i don't have to wait too long for it, and that it comes in before fees are due at school ...

anyways. thought i'd write something quickly just to get myself back in the habit; now i'm going to go do some more boxing-up things. and then i work at 2pm. no rest for the wicked....

i lied.

... i mean, i didn't REALLY lie, just changed my statement.

um.

what i mean is, i switched one of my courses - now i only have to go back and forth to abbotsford once a week:

Mon - Web Publishing - 8.30-11.20 - Abbotsford
Tues - System Hardware Concepts - 10.45-2.25 - Abbotsford
Wed - Principles of Computing - 10.00-12.50 - Chilliwack; Intro to Programming - 2.30-6.10 - Chilliwack

same courses, different schedule - and my mom says i can sleep over on monday nights at their house.
yay!

i was very lucky, actually - there was one seat left in the tuesday class. i SO ninja'd my way in there. hah.

okay. back to bed for me. night all!

exciting times.

so. i have registered for classes.
oi.
i'm half really excited and half freaking out. kind of like when i got my tattoo, but less painful and more expensive.

my schedule is gonna look like so:

Mon - Web Publishing - 8.30-11.20 - Abbotsford
Wed - Principles of Computing - 10.00-12.50 - Chilliwack; Intro to Programming - 2.30-6.10 - Chilliwack
Thurs - System Hardware Concepts - 1.00-4.40 - Abbotsford

now i have to buy my textbooks, and make sure my student loans will go through, and apply for scholarships and bursaries, and stuff.

oh boy.

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.

this WAS going to be a poem, but i changed my mind.

so just a quick update.
psalm 91 had a show in vancouver on saturday, it went pretty well, we get a video and an EP out of it, so that's cool.
i'm currently in a multitude of dilemmas, including one about where i'm going to live, and one about what i'm going to take at school, and one about what i'm going to do for a job, and one about what i'm going to do for transport (car???? driver's licence?????????? ehhhhh..... ), and the list goes on. so yeah.
jeff and i are coming up to one year dating, in a week - woot! love you jeff!
also, i got a new hole through my face on wednesday last week - i have a lip ring, bottom right. i WILL post pictures as soon as i can get my camera hooked up to a computer. have patience.
and yeah, i think that's about it for now.
love you all.

now what?

so a while back, you may remember, i was bitching about UFV's website. well i did apply for a course, eventually - the CIS program path, starting with CIS 146, intermediate web design - and i got a letter this afternoon from them, with my student ID and instructions for logging in to the website with it, and they're still processing my application.
so i logged in, and discovered i have a UFV email address now and everything. it's kind of exciting and kind of scary at the same time. and i'm just like, "oh wait i did really apply didn't i and what on earth did i get myself into?!?!?!"

oh yeah and i went for a walk this morning and passed a guy with the biggest blackest black eye i ever saw. like he just got hit last night or something, srsly.