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Meet the Subaru Tribeca. The picture doesn't do justice to its true hideousness. Those headlights look like they've been ripped off from the Porsche Cayenne, which was already a horrible mockery of the front of a Porsche 911. Then to up the ante, Subaru added its atrocious new snout. The angled bits at the back look like it's trying to parody the fins on old Cadillacs. Perhaps it isn't the ugliest car in the world, but someone drives one of these monstrosities around campus and it makes me cringe every time I see it.
My computer is finally kind of needing a reformat after nine months (I'm pretty sure that's some kind of personal record), but I'm not sure what to do about that. I could do a normal reformat easy, but I have a couple problems that wouldn't fix. I basically want to repartition, but I don't have anywhere near enough space to move things off the drive first for a clean repartition and repartitioning with data on the drive is a Very Bad Thing (PartitionMagic is the devil). Unfortunately I can't really upgrade my drive, as it seems 90% of notebook HDDs are 40GB whereas mine is already twice that. I saw an article about a 200GB perpendicular-bit notebook HDD that I would absolutely love, but it's not coming out for another year yet and will probably cost a gazillion dollars.
The weather right now is fantastic - a little cloudy, breezy, around 60 degrees. I was actually here in Corvallis exactly a year ago for grad school visitation, so this weather is partly what sold me on coming way the hell out here. Exactly a year ago today was the Newport trip. I'd certainly rather be out there than here in the apartment, but I have a bit of work to get done today.
This week is the last full week of labs, the term is finally winding down. I do have a couple major things to finish before the end of the term, but they're at least pretty well spaced out. I'm very much looking forward to coming home for spring break in just a couple weeks and then having a changeup of classes for spring quarter.
I found something new that is epic about Black & White 2 - the size of the save files. The game used nearly 2GB for autosave crap, thus filling my data drive. I threw it all out and kept my manual saves, but they apparently don't work any more and give me memory read errors. I was just about to beat the game too.
There are other problems I forgot to mention too, like how the patch is 109MB and invalidates previous saved files, or how it is such a resource hog it causes pre-rendered opening videos to lag on my machine, or how it takes like five minutes to quit the game because it's unloading so much garbage. I seriously don't appreciate BW2's lack of respect for machine resources.
So for those of you keeping track, CivIV is bland and unexciting, whereas BW2 is an OK game to play but will utterly kill your computer. Screw this crap, I am going back to Generals: Zero Hour until somebody makes a new game that's actually decent.
I made it to another weekend somehow. February finally died, thankfully. Only three more weeks left in the term. Apparently the PSM seminar for spring term has been scheduled for one of the worst possible time slots, so there's yet another minor PSM uprising in the works. It also sounded like my 3-credit business class for next term will be scheduled all on one night per week, so that's not entirely cool.
I put up reviews of Civilization IV and Black & White 2. It's very odd - those games seem to be diametric opposites of each other. The one game is exactly what the other is not. CivIV has a lean two CD's, while BW2 has an epic 4. CivIV has a novel for a manual, while BW2 has a pamphlet. CivIV has skirmishes and multiplayer modes but not single player story, while BW2 has - you guessed it - single player story but no skirmish or multiplayer. CivIV has ridiculously simplistic graphics, while BW2 causes biblically slow framerates with its rendered beauty.
Another update I intend to make is to compile all the quotes from my EM class. Dr. Stetz is very amusing. Those quotes are what make that class not a total waste so far, although we are finally getting in EM waves which I have been waiting two whole terms for and is the only thing I want out of EM.
Pandora actually scored a hit for me the other day. It's amazing at how Pandora can pick up on all the 'genes' of a song and yet usually completely misunderstands the feeling of the song. It did give me one new song that I've been listening to endlessly - 68 times so far, according to iTunes.
Speaking of new things, this webcomic is AWESOME.
I think it's going to be another fairly manageable week, which is good. I had an E&M exam this morning, which could certainly have gone worse. I might have actually done really well if I'd known what the hell I was doing, which would have been a coup almost worthy of PHY410.
It's already the seventh week of the term. I think I'm mostly past the grueling stuff and classes are now just a matter of making up for some rough spots I had earlier. Today's department seminar was actually pretty sweet, a guy from NIST talking about quantum calorimetry to detect hard gamma rays to fingerprint "special nuclear material" for nuclear weapons inspectors. The results he showed were pretty stunning compared to methods in use right now.
I am currently banging around in Dreamweaver in preparation for my PSM seminar tomorrow. I have no intention of using it except that's what the prof has picked for us to use in our website-making module, so if I figure out how it works ahead of time I'll look as smart as I should. This is especially important because Dreamweaver sucks and isn't as good as FrontPage, which I actually use. So some advance prep is required. Street price for Dreamweaver is $400. I don't think I'd pay a nickel for this crap.
I got to thinking about how I made MSU's SOAR website, and realized that I had no idea where I put all the cool pictures of the telescope. I think I wiped them off the drives, but fortunately I back things up to CD - apparently weekly, back then. I did find the enormous original files I was looking for. Some of them are pretty stunning. I should get out and take some pictures somewhere - I've only broken out my camera once so far this year, to document the migration to a proper desk in my apartment.
It seems like all my favorite webcomics are dying. PHD is starting to graduate people - first Mike (of all people), and maybe now Cecilia? Real Life is definitely past its prime, as well as Megatokyo. 8-bit Theatre is getting messed up so much if it doesn't die it will hardly be recognizable. Dilbert seems to have jumped the shark. It looks like even Ctrl-Alt-Del is going to start settling down and marrying people off. Perhaps the golden age of webcomics is over.
Oregon's weather right now is fantastic. It feels like a spring day would in Michigan, and it's early February. The sun is out all day, the days are getting longer, and the temperature is high enough I didn't wear my jacket.
Today I harassed several distributor branch offices and eventually Dr Pepper / 7Up itself, and found that what I feared is true - there is no distributor of Crush in Oregon. DPSUHQ told me the nearest distributor was around Seattle. However, L swears she's seen Crush somewhere (not in town though). Incidentally enough, my parents sent me a couple six-packs of Crush that arrived today, so I related my troubles about how impossible it is to get Crush to the other PSMs while drinking Crush. Now they think I run some kind of Crush smuggling ring.
Tomorrow is Friday. I am more than ready for it to be the weekend. However, tomorrow has a greater distinction than that - I will be a quarter of the way through my Master's program. Already! I am probably going to Salem tomorrow to celebrate with things I can't get here in Corvallis - a Best Buy run and a Papiano's pizza. Then there will be much gaming. No exams to grade this weekend.
I still can't find Crush out here. I do have some that I shipped from Michigan, but it's being strictly rationed and is already about halfway gone. I went through most of the grocers in the Corvallis phone book last week and no one has it. I might start bothering stores to see if someone is willing to get some.
I have also been scouring the internet for Crush. There are a couple of websites you can order pop from but I am kind of iffy on that. It also seems like there might be places in Portland where I can get Crush. I wouldn't go to Portland just for that, but I haven't been to the science museum up there yet and if I can come back with a trunkload of Crush that's even better.
So yeah, it's been a long time since I updated. I haven't done anything particularly interesting since last time, just school. Grad school will rough you up. The end of this coming week marks halfway through the term though.
I did end up buying Civ4, but it's less exciting than I'd hoped. In particular the combat stinks, but at least they fixed the screwup from Civ3 where spearmen would beat tanks. I have pretty much thrashed Ace Combat 5 except for a couple of medals left to earn.
I'm grading exams this weekend. Circumstances led to my pulling double duty this time, but that should mean I get a really easy time later in the term when I'll probably need it more. I'm halfway done so far, I need to put another six or seven hours in today.
I'm getting some useful stuff done on the side though. I finally filled out a draft for my program of study, and I graded this week's prelabs which are a big help during the week. I seem to be having a little more trouble putting names to faces in my labs, and I forgot a couple of people that I had last term but aren't in my current labs. And then there was the dude who shaved his heavy beard, thus rendering himself completely unrecognizable to me, to his great amusement.
IE7 Beta is out, but I haven't used it yet. Not for lack of trying - it won't install because of something I did to Windows a couple months ago to free up drive space. I wish laptop hard drives were bigger. I hear IE7 is a good step up though.
