Jackelopette

So my computer’s new motherboard seems to have triggered an OMG NOT GENUINE response from Vista. I went into the full Reduced Functionality Mode nonsense.

Then I spent 3 hours on various forms of tech support trying to find the right phone number to call. Then 30 minutes on hold using that number.

But I’m finally back in. Dear tech deities, I hate Vista and tech support lines. YEESH.

Despite my best efforts, HP left a rather important piece out of the shipment … the power cable.

Back when I was first shipping the mess off to HP, I questioned the tech whether I ought to include the cord, figuring that it was the Most Likely to Get Lost in the Shuffle. I was right, tech was perhaps misinformed, power cord is missing.

I’ve called tech support to register the complaint. They’re supposed to call me back.

I plan to make myself annoying tomorrow until I get my cable overnighted.

On the bright side, hard drive is working normally and I don’t appear to have lost any data. Woot.

Actually, it’s not all that bad.

But I’m still without my computer, and likely to remain that way until at least November 27th. Take that, all my glowing thoughts of HP’s service centers. I’m afraid your reputation is somewhat tarnished.

Things that have annoyed me about this repair:
1. Having to call THREE times AND chat with a technician to ensure that the ship-to address (once the repair’s completed) is NOT the ship-from address (i.e. Oak View).
2. Still not being completely confident that the address change made it through.
3. A 2-week delay that wasn’t communicated until the original “completed repair” delivery date.
4. Much as I like to think of myself as culturally tolerant, the current outsourcing of techs to other countries doesn’t work all that well for me. Mostly it’s because I have had some MAJOR difficulties in the last three weeks communicating my problems to techs whose English is not fluent. Especially when I use alternate terms for technical things… (i.e. “power strip” vs. “surge protector”).

Other than the computer rage, I’m settled in, I’m tweaking webpages and working on a lot of random little projects, and so far my life in the DC area seems to be going well. Quiet, very quiet, but well. Boston for Thanksgiving will be a welcome change – even if it’s quiet, it’ll be quiet in the fun kind of way I’ve come to expect from good friends. I hope.

I’ve made it into DC twice so far (this past Saturday and Sunday). I’m still processing what I saw and heard on Sunday – I was there for the 25th anniversary rededication of the Vietnam Wall. I stood in a crowd of thousands of veterans on Veterans Day, and listened to the stories told by people who lived it, and felt myself moved. The English major in me wants to sift through the layers of emotion and meaning I found, but then I feel that to overanalyze might weaken the effect it had on me. So I’ll say that I was there, and that afterwards I told my grandfather and my uncle, and that I sincerely hope I won’t forget it.

This weekend I’ll explore some of the Smithsonian museums – Air & Space is first on my list, then I’ll explore the rest as the mood takes me.

The Holocaust museum is also high on my list, but I’ll be careful of my mood before I go. From all tales, and from my own experience at the center in Los Angeles, I know that this one will be an intense visit.

So yes, friends and family, I’m here, I’m doing pretty well, and I’m feeling at home enough to challenge myself by seeking sights and sound and adventure. I’ll post again when I have more to say, and certainly when my thrice-accursed computer finally shows up.

I’m not exactly sure what it is about me, but my HP notebook computers like to die on me. First the Omnibook fries its motherboard during my rainy freshman year, then the Presario’s hard drive turns into a drunken maraca within a week of arrival, and now my Pavilion’s graphics card is D-E-D.

The ‘puters get resurrected by HP tech support on a regular basis, always within a year of purchase, and then they’re golden for the rest of their lifespans. In fact, the other two are still functioning in their respective new homes as far as I know.

This time my money’s on the graphics card going SPLAT. Yes, it’s a Pavilion notebook running Vista Home Premium, and yes, I spent the money on the max available memory, graphics, and CPU so theoretically it shouldn’t have had problems. Theoretically. >.<

Anyway, the computer had a few self-resolved graphics card driver crashes while playing Guild Wars that seemed to have been triggered by overheating, so I got a cooling fan to sit underneath the thing. The fan appeared to solve the problem so I figured we were good. Also Greg and I managed to install updated drivers that reduced the crashes even before the fan purchase. Whee.

Two nights ago I get home from Atlanta (just assume that Murphy’s law applied last week and that I was fractured to begin with) and I’m lap-surfing Firefox to catch up on everything I’d missed over the week. I close the lid (which suspends animation and triggers a Windows login screen when it opens again) and reopen it after a few minutes… nothing. Screen is black.

I’ve walked through the HP self-support steps (cold-boot, no-battery-boot, reseat-memory-boot, etc.) and I’ve called my geeks of war, and it looks like I get to ship computer off to HP for service.

Here’s the fun part: the designated shipping box won’t arrive for another 2-3 days, or so they claim. I leave for Chevy Chase on Thursday evening. I will not have a computer upon my arrival in DC Friday morning. I get to slam my head against a desk while explaining to HP exactly which address they need to send the computer to … and I also get to figure out just what that address is supposed to be. Whee.

Also, I will be on the East Coast for Thanksgiving. I don’t know yet what I’m doing instead of spending ~24 hours travelling but I am open to suggestion.

Care packages/emails/phone calls will be greatly appreciated over the next few weeks. I think I may go crazy.

I took a midterm today in my Sociology class. SOC 180A: Complex Organizations. Now, this test was entirely scantron — meaning that it was 25 extremely straightforward multiple-choice or true-false questions. The only one in which I had any confusion was #1, in which he failed to clarify one of the possible answers, but was very simple to explain once a couple of people asked him about it.

Beamish had a dictionary out on the desk so that “those who encounter words that are entirely unfamiliar may look up the information they need to interpret the test.”

Two words were apparently so unfamiliar and undecipherable that he stood up to announce their meanings to the entire class.

Meritocracy.
Omnipresent.

I finished the test fairly early, so I’m not sure of any other such questionable words, but honestly! We’re in an upper-division social science course at a UC campus. None of my fellow students appear to be from a non-English-speaking country. How difficult is it to break up these COMPOUND words into their respective roots?

Merit + cracy. Think of democracy, aristocracy, bureaucracy, theocracy. It was even defined in class two weeks ago. Is the word REALLY that hard to understand?

Omnipresent. Omnibus, omnipotent, omniscient… did we really do that badly on our SATs? Have we not yet completed any of our college writing requirements IN OUR BLOODY SOFT-SCIENCE MAJORS?

Y’know, if it were a bunch of chemists or engineers, I might be a little more sympathetic. But Soc-Sci?

Sorry, no. If you’re having trouble with words like these, what the HELL are you doing in a major (or department or academic field) that SPECIALIZES in making up stupid words to deal with concepts we already understand?

URGH.

For those who haven’t heard, I had a horrible Latin professor this quarter.

Fussbudget is a new professor, having transferred to the Classics department from another institution. She is one of those incredibly tense people, about 40 years old or so, with a knife-narrow face and a bit of an inferiority complex. She’s the opposite of confident, and sometimes that can manifest as a negative attitude. Overall, she was kind of like a skittish puppy.

Well, we got to write our class evaluations on Friday. There are a whopping 9 people in the class. About 15 transferred to the other Latin 100 class, taught by awesome Professor Romulus. Alas, that one wouldn’t have allowed me much time for work. Oh well. Anyway, the 9 of us mutually agreed to leave blank the potentially incriminating box at the top of the eval page. You know, the one where you mark boxes that affirm your status as a 4th-year female undergraduate in the humanities, or the token male in the class (poor Rob), or the token post-Bacc student or graduate student or classics major… with 9 people in the class it’d be pretty obvious who had which opinion.

Fussbudget brought coffee cake and mentioned conveniently that she’d be holding extra office hours just before the final. Oh, and she pretty much tailored the final to our specifications.

We gave her 3 out of 5 for the bribery.

Well, the class was fairly organized (Romulus’ doing — he wrote the syllabus for both of the LAT 100N classes) and the homework would have had a great deal of relevance to our translations (again, Romulus’ doing) so we marked the class itself with a 4 of 5.

Then we let loose with our critique of the professor teaching us. Helpful? Well, she tries to be. Reviews homework? Alas, no. Confident in the material presented? Nope, sorry. She actually said at the beginning of the quarter that she loathes Latin prose. Why teach it, then?

At the bottom of the page there’s space for us to write our notes. I settled for a breakdown of the time generally spent in class.

10:00 – 10:15: We wait for her to arrive. Some of us complete the homework due today.
10:15 – 10:20: She arrives, arranges her books and such on the table, and occasionally spends another 5 minutes handing back homework. “D” describes completed homework, “DW” describes homework done well, although there’s little aid given for mistakes. The homework is not reviewed in class.
(Friday quizzes 10:20 – 10:30)
10:20 – 10:30: Confusing review of the previous session’s translation. If there are questions, the answers are vague and unhelpful. Sometimes we get some interesting tangents, though.
10:30 – 10:50: Consisting of awkward translations of that day’s assigned passage, sometimes including tangents and explanations of grammatical constructs that would have been useful last week when we were trying to figure out the homework or study for the quiz.

Next quarter I’m taking Medieval Latin from Blanca. At least she’s competent in the material and doesn’t overtly detest it.

Oh well, I’ve only two classes left to satisfy my combination language requirement and minor. Bleah.

For those who know me and my mother fairly well, you’ll recall that she majored in theater. The family lovingly referred to it as “advanced kindergarten.”

While we were in the Mono/Mammoth area, we collected lots of dirt and pretty clay and various other substances (most of them legal). Now that we’re back in town, we spend Tuesday afternoons discussing the “adult” portions of the trip, including the legal and scientific issues surrounding the Lake and the ski resort as well as our doomed plant-measuring attempt. On Thursdays we revert to our inner children and play with art supplies. It’s fun.

We fingerpainted today. Granted, we were using pigments from the multihued clays that we gleaned from the mine, but dude! Fingerpainting! I’ve come full circle! Ann even joked at me for coloring inside the line that I drew.

The other item of discussion was the concepts of aesthetics… in Japanese “wabi-sabi” and modernism. Apparently the ideal wabi-sabi item has no ideal; it is a man-made object that is slowly “devolving” into nothingness or at least a greater organic unity with Nature.

Some examples of “wabi-sabi” (according to Ann at least):
- a chunk of tire rubber that she used to play a joke on the geologist ’cause it looked like rock
- a rusted old bullet casing that got kablooied into a lovely shape reminiscent of a dahlia
- another chunk of rubber that was absolutely chewed/decomposed to shreds and looked like rodent intestines
- Ricky’s desiccated banana. Technically not man-made, but certainly man-bred.

Me, I think the whole ethic arose from men snorting too much wasabi up their noses and short-circuiting their artistic sensibilities. At least it’d explain the name…

I appreciate the sort of awareness – sometimes when we leave things to decay they take on cool new forms and meanings. Then again, I don’t know that I’m driven to create something that seems wabi-sabi. I’d rather just allow it to happen and appreciate it when it does.

Either that or I’m lazy. Too much fingerpainting goes to your head.

All right. So I’m very stressed and about ready to throttle a couple of NAC professors. Specifically, the ones who are leading this Mono Lake trip thing.

suffice it to say that I am sick of the lack o’ planning and meaningful preparation for this course. And it ain’t just the food. It’s the wasting of 6 hours of my life in various meetings where they aren’t prepared, the useless emails saying “oooh don’t send any more questions ’cause we’re too busy!” … two days before the trip … and the total lack of any food prep until today. The day before we leave.

UGH.

Oh well, once we get there it should be fun. And I kick arse at prepping! My meal night is tomorrow, and I’ve already made my dish! Salmon and rice mixed into sort of a casserole-type dish! And all I will have to do is heat it up. Mmmm I feel good about that. And I only have to cook for half — aka the meat-eaters!

And the old apartment is mostly clean.

It’s just… I have a week at Mono, then 3 days in Davis, then 6 days in the DC area, classes starting while I’m in DC, a helluvalot of Collegiate 4-H and Computer Corps stuff to catch up on, and and and…

Well, I’ll continue taking it one day at a time. I’m told that we’ll get minimal cell reception up there, and that taking time to answer calls is seen as voluntarily leaving the community, so I will turn my phone on just once at night and see if I’ve gotten any text or voice messages. So yes, unless you hear from me, I’m alive. But I would like some nice little surprises when I turn my phone on at night. Please?

Ok, off to bed. Morning will come waaaaay too soon.

Sandy’s leaving to study abroad on Thursday. She couldn’t get her student visa till today, because of massive paperwork delays.

After a long day’s suffering, I’m finally getting to study for my Anthro final. We were supposed to leave ‘Frisco at noonish…

We left at 8.
Got to BART around… 9:15.
Found a spot (finally) at about 9:45ish.
Got to San Francisco at about, oh, say 10:30ish.
Got to the Franch Consulate at about 10:40ish and spent until 11:20 running around getting bank statements and photocopies.
Got back to the Consulate at 11:30.
Made more photocopies at STA travel.
Found out that Sandy’s photo ‘wasn’t quite right’ for her student visa.
French Consulate closes at 12 for a 2-hour lunch break.
We got lunch, met a cool dude who helped us kill time by telling us about a cool child-sponsorship program, got a fresh photo, and made it back to the Consulate at 2.
Waited in line forever.
Finally got seen (again) at 2:30.
Finally got the visa in hand at 3:00.
Another BART ride and incredible traffic later, we finally made it back to Davis at 5:45. PM.

Effin’ FRENCH BUREAUCRACY!

I detest being sick. There is nothing guaranteed to bring me low so much as illness. I’ve spent the last three days, or at least the simple majority thereof, sleeping and sniffling and scratchy-voiced and sore-throated.

I especially don’t like having my Picnic Day festivities experienced under the influence of mild fever. I mean, that slightly drunk sort of disorientation is fun, but I’d rather not have it wasted on a beautiful day with the bands playing and people having fun and life generally looking good. No no. I prefer my delirium on rainy gray days when I can nestle comfortably into my covers with good books to feed my hallucinatory dreams.

Running a fever on a warm day is miserable. There is no way to cool off, and if I try, I’d just get the prickly-skinned chills. Rawr.

So I survived the high school students, but of course this year we got a really good group and I wasn’t coherent enough to enjoy the fun. I went to Picnic Day, where the entire campus turns into a huge 100,000-person party and the feeling of collegiate affection is high, but I was only ambulatory therein for about two hours. Then I went home and slept for an equivalent amount. I visited Sandy’s family in Walnut Creek for their Easter/Sandy’s Birthday celebration today, but crashed for about 4 hours on one of their guest beds. I find it amazing that my voice (apparently) doesn’t sound nearly as scarred as it feels.

And here I am, having slept, say…hmmm 39 of the last 72 hours. 54% or more than half of the last three days.

I blame my roommate.

She’s had the cold/sore throat thing for the last week or so. This feels more like real flu. Obviously – I’ve got the fever, the associated sore muscles and incredible fatigue, my usual fever-associated backache, the cough, the slightly scratchy throat… Bah.

At least I’m far away from February, that accursed month of grayness and flat pressure. Although, I must admit, this year’s February had some gorgeous days and some good conferences. And the weather was much much brighter than usual.

So I think I’ll go sleep some more, and if I don’t feel better tomorrow I’ll drop by Cowell after Anthro lecture.

I mean, it has been getting better. My throat isn’t really sore, and the congestion has been fairly manageable without drugs (since I ran out of Sudafed!). I’m just sick of the fatigue. Blah.