I Am in the Future

I am posting this entry from my Raspberry Pi!  That was my main Christmas gift this year, and it's been very nice to chill out in the basement, browsing the internet on a nice big TV screen.

Things I still need to do with my Raspberry Pi: figure out how to do things other than just browse the internet; figure out how to write on it.  A text editor came with the desktop interface that I'm using, but I've yet to see if I can open my OpenOffice/LibreOffice files with it.  I really need to just plug in my flash drive and see what happens (if it reads the files, great, if not, then I know I need to try something else), but every time I think of it, I'm downstairs and my flash drive is upstairs and I'm too lazy.

I'm using a wireless keyboard and mouse combo, and it works really well - very lightweight, just chilling in my lap - but I notice that I have the same problem I have with the keyboard case for my tablet.  The shift key is small and about a quarter inch further to the right than it is on a standard keyboard, so I'm constantly hitting the Page Up key instead.  I'm sure at a certain point, if I use it enough, I'll get used to it, but as of right now I don't type with either of my l'il keyboards enough to not have to consciously think 'move your pinky over a tad bit more' every time I capitalize something.

I also just discovered today that you can't just watch YouTube on a Raspberry Pi.  You have to do all this other stuff.  And I'm still a little intimidated by all the programming and coding shit that's kind of like the whole point of a Pi.  So for the time being I just won't watch YouTube using this.

To continue with the previous post's theme, I cannot find my disc for Photoshop. I can find every single solitary random mix CD I burned for my younger sisters ten years ago, but my Photoshop CD? I cannot find it. I can find the disc to install Windows 95 but my Photoshop CD? I cannot find it. I can find the disc for Tetris that came for free in a can of Pringles, but my Photoshop CD?

I CANNOT FIND IT.

GUYS, I AM GOING TO CATCH ON FIRE.

So, you should never buy a new computer. I'm just saying. The trials and tribulations ever since I bought that thing, it's like I was actively shaking my fist at Fate or something and he was like, "LET'S DO IT, AHA." First of all, since I've been using a laptop for almost five years, I had completely forgotten about the need for a monitor; I dragged in Marshall's old one from the garage, and I don't know what he did to it, but the connections were so jacked up; the screen was green and I couldn't change the contrast or brightness, it would randomly black out for up to a minute at a time, it couldn't run certain applications in full screen, et cetera. Today I finally got down to the thrift store and bought an old one for five bucks that while gigantic and cumbersome, actually works, so there's that.

Back to the day I set the new computer up. I thought, oh, transferring my files will be a breeze! I keep absolutely everything on my external hard drive! And I do mean everything: all my pictures, everything I've written in college, all my scripts, videos, my music, icons, everything. Everything.

Everything.

So when I plugged in my external hard drive and the new computer didn't recognize it, I was bummed, but not discouraged; I would have to burn DVDs on my old computer and that would take a while, but no big deal. Until I plugged it back into my laptop and that didn't recognize it, either. And I tried again and again, and turned everything off and turned it all back on, and safely removed over and over, and plugged in a few more times. It didn't recognize the device.

I sat downstairs and literally cried for ten minutes.

We took my hard drive to one of the computer tech places and they plugged it into a computer that was running Linux and everything popped up okay, and the guru literally had no idea why it would do that, but we took it back home and plugged it into my old laptop and it worked. So it wasn't a total loss, at least. In the end, it took 23 DVDs to burn off all my data. You can imagine how long that took.

Set up iTunes, and of course I didn't get to keep my play counts, my playlists, my date added, and all the rest of my meta data. Of course. I read, like, twenty different tutorials, and short of manually editing my .xml file, there's apparently no way to keep all that stuff when you transfer over to a new computer. Thanks, Apple! Also, my one hundred songs that I've either purchased, or gotten as a free iTunes download, or Laura has? Have to be authorized. Can you do that if you don't have a connection to the internet? Ha! So I have to go buy a twenty foot ethernet cable, oh yeah.

Thank God, my version of Final Draft still installed. I don't know what I would have done.

Well, Laura and I did it. We got up, sat in line, and charged through a store like crazy people. We weren't planning to, and then last night around 7pm my dad looked up from the paper.

"Nebraska Furniture Mart has laptops for $229."

I bought my laptop in 2005. Laura bought her computer in 2004. Both are slow, cumbersome, and basically falling apart. Her DVD drive quit working over a year ago, and I don't trust mine any more. And it's been a while since I could run more than one program at a time. Make icons AND listen to music? Ha! So we talked and talked and talked, and finally decided to go for it.

We got everything out the night before, went to bed at 9pm, and woke up at 3am this morning. It was barely above freezing, and the store didn't open till 7am, so we knew we were looking at almost 4 hours outside. I put on: two pairs of socks, a pair of comfortable exercise pants underneath a pair of jeans; a thermal undershirt, a t-shirt, one of my dad's insulated work shirts, and a jacket; a scarf, a knit hat, gloves; my woolen cloak.

Waiting in line wasn't too bad. Aside from my face, I was actually quite warm; in fact, my face being a little cold ended up being good, because my core was almost too warm. The last half hour was a little bad, because my toes, as well as Laura's toes, got a little too cold - tennis shoes are so porous, no matter how many socks you have underneath.

They were giving out vouchers in the form of wristbands for the eight big-ticket items: two HDTVs, a Blu-Ray player, a Dyson, a netbook, a computer tower, a computer package with monitor and printer, and the laptop. Laura and I were a bit overwhelmed when we saw how many people had camped out with tents, but the first half of the line just didn't look that packed, so we tried to stay optimistic. Then, as the time for the vouchers to be handed out drew near, and people started packing up their lawn chairs and their tents and the propane tanks hooked up to God knows what (no lie), and everyone stood up, we realized we had around 250-300 people in front of us. It was going to be close.

The Blu-Ray player came first. Laura went ahead and got a voucher for it just in case nothing else made it back to us. Then the 32 inch HDTV came by, and I got that one. The man in front of us, who'd driven an hour in the hopes of picking up a Dyson, got one and was so happy, it was a pleasure to just be in the company of someone radiating undiluted contentment. And then, tragedy!

"We are all out of laptops! The laptops are gone!"

So shouted the man no more than thirty people ahead of us. We'd waited in the freezing cold for hours what was essentially the middle of the night, and it was all for naught. As we walked to the line forming in front of the doors, a young woman asked if we wanted a voucher for the computer tower. Whatever. Fine.

Another forty-five minutes, and then the doors opened! I have never. It was I don't even. Like, literal thousands and thousands of people running, pushing, shoving, yelling, grabbing, blocking. I saw people knocked over. I saw someone climb on top of a pallet and start throwing digital picture frames to their family behind them. I had a cart run into the back of my legs so hard that I had visions of the Pamplona bulls. But Laura and I ended up getting all of the smaller items that were on our list: two $10 DVD players, a personal DVD player for Sarah for $40, $9 wireless headphones for Marshall, four pairs of earbuds for 97 cents, a rice cooker for $12, and an LED flashlight for a dollar. Then we stood in the voucher line.

Three and a half hours in line outside, now another hour in line inside. We called our parents, we talked. Mom and Dad wanted the HDTV, but didn't care about the Blu-Ray player, and neither Laura nor I wanted to get it, either, so she took off that wristband. We went back and forth, and decided that the tower was a really good deal. 6 gigs of memory. My laptop has 256mb, so that's 24 times as much. 640 gigs of hard drive space. My computer? Has 40. We had planned to pick up 1tb external hard drives to go with the new laptops, for $90, but 640 would be plenty. Plus, Laura already had a monitor, and we have two other extras floating around the house, so that wouldn't be a problem.

So we both got the desktops. $299, which was about $50 of retail. The more we talked about it, the more we convinced ourselves that this was a better deal both financially and in the long run than getting the laptops. By the time we were ready to check out, we were pretty psyched.

And then we saw the line to check out.

Desktop meme! Post a picture of your desktop - no fair changing things beforehand. That means if you have an embarrassing picture up there, so be it.


(Click for full size.)

Sniff. I miss my dead robot show.

The family bought a new computer, so I've been playing around with that. Vista is shiny and new, yet strange and different. I'm really happy with all the memory, though; I've never had Civ turns cycle so quickly!

Was fingerprinted today, for a background check, for a substitute certificate. You would think that they'd still have my fingerprints on file from three years ago, but I guess not. Every single person working at the police station was very unfriendly; I mean, I guess I can understand that maybe, dealing with the people they must deal with day in and day out, it's not always the most pleasant job, but seriously. I felt like I'd done something wrong, just coming in to get fingerprinted for a job. (I also set off the metal detector, which was awesome.)

I saw the S4 VM thing they'd mocked up for the network. It made me a little sad. It wasn't the direction I would have picked for the show, and the FBI thing was weird when I first heard about it, but the little mini-ep thing was pretty interesting, and I bought it (although I had no idea how far in the future they were setting it; had to have been at least five years). Maybe one of these days I'll finish out S3. I still have no idea how it ended.

I've been working on my thesis report for two hours. Works just decided to Not Respond randomly in the middle of typing for no apparent reason even though nothing else was acting strangely.

I lost four pages.

SON OF A FRAKKING BITCH. Works, Works, what hast thou dunst?