Babbles of a Procrastinating Grad Student

I just bought a Kobo (ereader thing that's not an Amazon product).  I'm actually pretty excited about this despite my technophobe tendancies and the general pro-book-anti-ereader stance I've generally taken.  I can load all sorts of fic and ebooks that I normally read on my laptop, as well as pdf documents like my knitting patterns!  To be honest, it was the pdf reader thing that won me over.  :D

Now if I could just get this thing synched with my computer...

I have achieved wireless!

I bought a router ages a go, and it's been sitting around in the box ever since.  Partially because I'm lazy, but mostly because I wanted a fun name for my router.  This morning, when I walked into my living room and looked around, it finally occurred to me:

Unsubtle birds.

It's the little things.  :D

I bought a new laptop today.

Okay wait, let me go back.  Not long after finishing my thesis, my poor old HP kicked the bucket, in July or August, I think.  I knew it was coming, there were tonnes of warning signs, but I just needed it to get me through to the end of my thesis.  I was really sad when it finally flailed itself to death, because he'd been a good little laptop and my companion through the thesis hardships, and he had cute stickers on him, to boot.

Of course, it's never a good time to lose your lifeline computer, and at the time I was job hunting.  So my Uncle offered me his.  This thing is a beast, huge and cumbersome, crappy and slow.  Decent battery life though, I'll give it that.

Anyways, I've been using it ever since my own deary kicked the bucket, and argh I hate it.  It's been especially slow and annoying the last few weeks.  This afternoon, I finally screamed in rage and high-tailed it off to the computer store to get an idea of what's out there now.  And in my usual method of shopping, walked out the door with a new computer within 20 minutes.

I haven't started to set her up yet, but she's pretty and shiny.  I'll give more details tomorrow one I've played with her a bit. 

YAY NEW LAPTOP!  \o/

I think so, anyways.

It's been threatening to die for a while now, but it kept limping along, and i thought it was simply being its own melodramatic self (I encourage it by spazzing out every time something weird happens).  But yesterday, I closed the lid on it in the middle of reading a pdf ebook, and when I came back and opened it, the screen remained black.  The dash was still lit up, but no one, apparently, was home.  Repeated hard reboots yielded the same results, and now I'm in panic mode (again).

Of course this happens when I find a job in Winnipeg, that I believe I need to apply for by the 25th (I hope).  Since it took me about 10 minutes to navigate to here to vent on my Grandma's old dinosaur, and the bloody thing crashed when I tried to access the company website, I don't think I'll be able to apply on here.  Stupid piece of crap dinosaur computer.  ARGH!

But, my Uncle has been a saint, and is lending me his laptop.  Which he's had for 2 years and has never ever used.  While I'm incredibly grateful, I really REALLY hate setting up new (old) laptops.  :)  Oh well, so long as I can apply for this job by tomorrow.  

Luckily, my laptops repeated attempts to die made sure that I backed everything up often, including (especially) my resume files, so that's a bonus, at least.  :)

I am not entirely pleased by this.   Mostly because, crap, now I own a cell phone.

And to exemplify why exactly this is a bad thing, instead of coming home and tidying and making supper and writing my thesis, as planned, I tracked down phone numbers and proceeded to text with my best buddy for an hour and a half.  

And I don't do multitasking.

*headdesk*

ETA: It's a Samsung Linx, if anyone is curious.  Everyone else on facebook seems to be (I don't really know why, but I hate cells, so I'm not an authority on the subject).  

What a bad day.  A terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day.

Well, most of it.

It started off well enough.  I ran away this afternoon not long after waking up (I'm on a 2 pm to 6 am wake schedule, so it's a little off from most normal people right now) to do some research at a local coffee shop.  That went all right, and I got a lot of work done.  I was extra pleased because I it was lovely enough outside that I wore a new grey knit dress - with cardi and tights, of course - and was feeling pretty good about myself.

But it's still early spring here, and there's still lots of water and melting snow around.  On the way home, I hopped over a puddle onto the grass to avoid a larger lake puddle on the sidewalk, and promptly slid and fell on my butt.  In the puddle. 

And the day sort of went downhill from there. 

For the last few hours, I've been fighting with my computer.  It's lagging like crazy, suddenly working hard and overheating, and the system icon that tells me my battery power is no longer working accurately.  It'll say I have 70% power left, but then shut down because the battery is dead.  It did this to me yesterday, although at least then it was at ~20% power.  I don't know what's going on, but I'm running lots of spyware and anti-virus software right now to see if that's the problem. 

Hmm...the last spyware program just finished running, and it - along with all the other programs I've run - says everything's kosher.  Well, what the heck, computer.

Maybe it's just that my battery needs to be replaced.  It's been draining faster and faster, the last month.  It used to last a good 2-3 hours on battery, depending on what I was doing.  Now, I'm lucky if it lasts an hour.  If the change had been more gradual, I might be less concerned, but this was rather sudden.

In addition, the last couple months, my disc drive isn't working anymore.  Or rather, rarely works.  Oft times, after opening the computer, the disc drive will start running really fast, making this loud whirling sound and causing my whole computer to vibrate.  The only way this stops is when I either shut the computer down, or close the laptop and let it sit for a while (the drive will stop running after a few minutes).

ARGH COMPUTER!  The stupid part is, I paid an arm-and-a-leg for a 3 year extended warranty from Best Buy when I bought this thing, and it's still under coverage.  But there's two problems with that: 1) I can't just give up my computer for the weeks - months they'll take to do any repairs, and 2) I've been trying to get them to order a replacement keyboard for this thing since they promised to replace it AT THE TIME I BOUGHT IT since it was a floor model and the escape key was broken.  That was 2.5 years ago.  ALSO, when my harddrive bit the dust, they gave me the wrong information and I ended up shelling out about the same amount of money for the replacement harddrive as I paid for the extended warranty.  When I came in with some installation problem (oh hey right, the re-install discs I BOUGHT FROM THEM didn't work), they told me that it should've been covered under my warranty.

Fuck you, Best Buy.  I don't trust leaving my laptop with you.  I'll probably never get it back.

Anywho, yay computer problems.  So of course, because of all this, my little productive streak came to a (sliding) end.  I've got 3 hours left before bedtime, and frankly, I just want to go sew.

*headdesk*

BTW, FUSS IF YOU'RE READING THIS, SO SORRY I WASN'T ONLINE FOR A CHAT.  I RAN AWAY THIS AFTERNOON AND DIDN'T REMEMBER UNTIL MUCH LATER.  I'LL EXPLAIN NEXT TIME I CATCH YOU.

( There are days when I don't think I'll ever finish my thesis. )

Alright, I'm done complaining.  This is what I love about this journal, I can get it off my chest and move on.  Off to go for a walk, get some fresh air and exercise after being cooped up in my apartment for...ever.  :)

While not making the work any easier, it is considerably nicer to have to learn how to use a certain program for my thesis while sitting on the back patio with a cup of coffee at my elbow, rather than in my humid and hot office.  :)

*le sigh*  I hate learning new computer programs, and I have 3 of them to suss out in the coming weeks.  Blah thesis blah.

In other news, nommy raisin spice cookies are still nommy.  Mmm...cookies.  Poor Cookie Monster is jealous.