Ardath Rekha

I'll be over here, sleeping forever.

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I've been settling in nicely with the new computer. Almost all of my software is loaded in, and I've spent the day messing around with customizations. I've also tested out the video -- for most of my basic uses, the on-board chipset is going to be perfectly good. I've played a 720p .mkv file (something that I could barely do, and which often froze, on the old desktop before I got it a separate video card) without any trouble at all, and it looked and sounded gorgeous. I will test it again with some of my iTunes HD media once I've reinstalled iTunes, and then maybe see how it handles video rendering in Adobe Premiere, but I think it's going to be just fine in its straight-out-of-the-box state for a good while to come.

It's so quiet. I think it's the quietest desktop I've ever had, too. So while a part of me is still a little blue about not being able to swing a Mac at this point, I've still come out of this transition ahead. Well ahead.

In other random news, Ellie-cat has a stuffed stingray that my parents got her for Christmas, and lately she's actually taken to noticing it and playing with it. Today she somehow carried it (and it's almost as large as she is) into her bed box so that she could sleep on top of it. I just melted when I realized what she'd done. That and the alpaca plushie (made of real alpaca wool) are her two favorite toys and she dotes on them. Yeah, life is pretty good right now. :)

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Today was The Day. As I was planning to pick up the new desktop in the early afternoon, I spent my morning doing a final backup of the dying computer and then began uninstalling all of my remaining programs and personalizations. I was almost done when my turn with the car came, and I went off to Best Buy to bring my new Gateway home.

I swear, the second I walked into my room with the box, Dying Desktop took one look at it and said "fuck you, bitch, Imma jump off a cliff!"

It had been behaving really well for the past few days! But suddenly it was freezing up repeatedly and requiring constant reboots for the last hour of its "life." I had to really fight it to get the last few things uninstalled and deleted. But I think I was laughing through most of it because it was just so ridiculous. It really felt like it knew I was retiring it and announced "YOU CAN'T FIRE ME I QUIT!!!"

It goes to its new "forever home" on Monday. I'm giving it to Rick, the engineer who runs my college's DVComm department and teaches the tech courses for film and digital media. The department is chronically underfunded and the man is an absolute genius with electronics, so he will not only be able to use the computer (either whole or in parts, which is his call) but keep it going for a few more years. And meanwhile, I'm setting up the Gateway. Which, so far, is behaving marvelously. It will take me a few days to get everything I use loaded onto it, but it's a lot faster than anything I've had before, so maybe it won't take as long as I think.

It's going to be my last Windows computer, but it should hold me nicely until I can afford a Mac. Then again, if my suspicions that inanimate objects don't really exist are right, it's already plotting against me. XD

Oh. And. The Internet has seriously warped me. As I was going to Best Buy, I passed a sign that said "NO U TURN" and my brain automatically responded with "no U!!!" Then I giggled for the rest of the drive.

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...but it actually won't be a Mac yet, wah. I would love to have one, but the models that I'd need (in terms of drive space, memory, and CPU speed) are out of my current price range. With the desktop in its final throes and my laptop having declared that it wants to commit suttee on the desktop's pyre or something (it might just need its drive wiped and restored, but the way its DVD-RW drive is acting, I'm not sure that wouldn't be akin to letting it commit electronic suicide anyway, argh, my appliances constantly have me convinced that there are no such things as inanimate objects, because they're too perverse and spiteful not to be cogito ergo summing it up when my back is turned) I can't really afford to wait until I've put aside more funds. The yay is that I've found a really good and highly-rated desktop, with stats that definitely out-perform my current one on its very best day ever, that's right in my price range, and the Festival just paid me, so it will probably be mine this weekend. This will hopefully give me some time to relax and not worry about dying hardware while I build up a nest egg for the machine I really really want: a Macbook Pro.

It will be mine. Just not quite as soon as I'd hoped. But I'm getting there, and the machine I'll bring home this weekend should help me get there in time. If I play my cards right, this one will actually make it to obsolescence before it dies. :)

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Exhausted. Elated. Worded-out. Pinned under a purring and forgiving cat. There is a whale in my room and a jingle stuck in my head and a million ridiculous stories I could tell. If I weren't so tired. But I am, essentially, back.

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So I'm now on spring break. Really, it started for me on Thursday at about 3:00 pm, when I handed in my second midterm and headed home. And it's going to be a marvelous week for it here in the Land of Cleve. Starting tomorrow, the weather is going to stay in the 50s and 60s for the whole of break. Which is absolutely amazing for this time of year; four years ago to the day, we were currently buried under a massive blizzard. Not that I'm complaining at all, of course. Give me balmy breezes over blizzards any day, thank you.

I'm actually on the dying desktop at the moment, and may try to hang onto it for a few more weeks strictly as a media player as it can handle hi-def content better than my laptop can. But I'm transitioning off all of my other programs. I may have actually solved a big problem that was plaguing it by removing a bunch of Cyberlink-designed bloatware, but I still can't trust it. One of these days, it's just not going to power up, and I know it. But if I can, I'll try to make it last until I can bring home the Mac Mini to supplant it, at least for media files. The laptop should handle all of the productivity stuff just fine, though. So this coming week is going to see some reshuffling of where things are located in my room, to accommodate the use of the laptop and the relegation of the desktop to the status of just a media player.

I've been decluttering like a fiend, too. I've been sending sooooooo much paper to the recycler. It's so easy to store all of my written notes on the iPad, and other things as well, and actually have them with me wherever I am as a result, so a LOT of paper is getting tossed out. I have this bad habit of collecting pamphlets at county fairs, too, especially from programs like the various forestry and land management services. I've actually been going to their websites and downloading .pdf versions of those pamphlets and then recycling the hard copies, and from now on, I am not going to bring home any brochures that are downloadable (and hopefully that'll be all of them soon.

For the next week I'm going to write the shit out of my pilot episode script, too. Because no studying will get in the way of that, and during the Festival I'll actually be interacting with a guy who's one of the main screenwriters on a really successful TV series, and he's receptive to taking a glance at it and giving me some pointers. So I want to have it in a condition where I'll be eager to show it to him and not at all embarrassed about its state.

So, my spring break is going to consist of lots of spring cleaning and preparations for the Festival. And lots of open windows because it'll be warm enough. :D And stuff. But it feels like it's off to a good start.

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The other day I discovered that the desktop had frozen while in screen-saver mode, and was completely locked up. It did it again today, while I was actively using it, so the screen saver is emphatically not the source of the problem. Then it did it again while I was working on making a backup of my AppData folder's Local folder. Fortunately I HAVE been backing up regularly so my data should be safe.

Although I actually do have the desktop up and running at the moment, I am declaring it dead. All of my expensive programs are being de-licensed and uninstalled, and then I will probably wipe the drive and offer the machine to the God Of Engineering at my college's DVComm department. Having watched him tear apart electronics equipment to keep computers going, I'm sure he can make good use of the parts, if nothing else. He's uniquely qualified to keep it alive for a while longer, too, should he choose to. As for me, I will set up the laptop (which I've barely used in about a year) in its place until I can afford its intended replacement. Which should hopefully be in mid-April.

No more Windows PCs for me, though. Ever again. This has gotten beyond ridiculous. And why yes, I AM typing this from my iPad, which just got a promotion under the circumstances. Best investment EVER.

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I got my term papers back today, from two of the classes I'm still attending. I got As on both of them. This was actually a surprise to me. Not because the papers weren't good -- rereading them now that I'm no longer sick to death of them (which I always am at the end of writing a paper) I can see that they really are very good -- but because that's how thoroughly the professor I "fired" damaged my self-confidence in a single class period. I promptly tore apart the two essays in my head, deciding that I'd probably misread those assignments too and hadn't actually done them right either (and god damn it, I did do the assignment for him in exactly the way he specified, but this kind of thinking that the situation inspired is exactly why I had to get out of there asap). Nope! Professor J said my work was "Excellent, and careful reading -- good points throughout" and Professor S said that my paper was "very interesting stuff. Perhaps you'll pursue some aspect(s) of this material for your final paper" and called one of my points in the paper an "elegant formulation."

And yeah, I do kind of need to crow about this because that guy completely screwed with my head, even more than I thought he had. I was already planning out how I'd rewrite both of the papers to fix all of the problems I'd imagined into existence with them. Which, as it turns out, I don't need to do at all, and never did. If anything, this makes me feel vindicated for dropping the class, since I might still be caught in a poisonous mire of self-recrimination if I hadn't done so.

Two midterms on Thursday and then I get to relax for a while.

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So. The desktop computer is still planning its imminent demise, although we seem to have come to a bit of an agreement that might keep it going for a while longer. This involves keeping all external hard drives unplugged until after it boots, and removing the Cyberlink crap software that came with the factory install, and which was trying to hog the CPU today. It also had to run a startup repair today, but as that actually appears to have worked, I'm in favor of it. We shall see how things go from here. I'm moving critical documents into my Dropbox so that I don't even have to think about whether or not they've been backed up. Hopefully I can get through the next week -- including midterms -- without it melting down on me, and then over spring break I'll get my laptop all prepared to take over hard computing if need be. At least long enough to hold me until I can get the mac mini.

I've felt like crud for about two or three weeks now, physically. Possibly not coincidentally, my mother has been down with the flu for the same duration of time. I haven't had truly fluish symptoms the way she has, but my immune system may simply have killed it and then decided to beat me up for good measure, as it is wont to do. At the moment I have the urge to just lie around and be very still for a while. Possibly with a cat purring in my face. And I am very glad that I don't have a certain Creative Writing project hanging over me right now, when I have no energy to work on it; so glad I bugged out of there. I can work on my script instead if I get the energy together.

Tomorrow I turn 41. Meh. But I get to go eat shrimp at Benihana's with my parents, and that much rocks. Curse my birthday for almost always falling during midterms. Tuesday morning is the first Festival Staff Meeting, so I have to drag my butt downtown extra-early and then go from there to my classes. Oh, and it's election day. Joy. Since I'm not registered with any party -- nobody gets to count on my vote, y'all have to earn it every time -- I'd ignore it except there's an actual issue up on the ballot. So my day involves rushing downtown, then rushing to campus, then rushing to my polling place. Hopefully I'll be more energetic by then. Right now I feel like a limp noodle.

P.S. Latest iPad recs: GarageBand, NASA (gorgeous pictures) and, if you're of a similar age to me and played these games when they first came out, "The 7th Guest" and "The Labyrinth of Time" have been resurrected for the iPad and are awesome to experience again.

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Which is something I haven't done since, oh... 1997 when I was at U of L. But which I did back then for similar reasons. While I know that it can never be completely possible for professors to check their personal baggage at the classroom door, any more than it can be for students, they should at least make an effort not to be so toxic that the classroom needs to be turned into a Superfund site. In both of these incidents, I was vividly reminded of my grandfather, who was bipolar and would sometimes start ranting unexpectedly at us over the most trivial things. So I was kind of a wreck when I got home yesterday, as much angry as hurt, and just not feeling like that classroom was anything like a remotely safe space anymore. And you know, that's kind of a big problem when the class in question is Creative Nonfiction, and your professor is insisting on focusing on autobiographical/memoir writing and wants everybody to dig deep into their personal experiences and inner conflicts.

I'm not flashing that shit to anyone I can't trust. Funny, that.

Which means, you know, sitting in the room listening as people start ragging on the two members of our class who are absent that day, out of the blue (and instigated by the professor) knocked me out of anything approaching my comfort zone or my willingness to open up and share with anybody. Ever again. Us Social Anxiety Disorder types can keep the fucking paranoia under control only if we can tell ourselves "they'd never do that to me" and believe it, which you can't do once you've heard them doing it to someone else. And having the professor suddenly tell the brassy-voiced woman in our class that her speaking tone is disrespectful to him and she'd better never use it again (especially since, frankly, the same tone coming out of any male student's mouth would never get challenged and the tone he was using was a shitload more confrontational) had me wanting to tackle him and jam a metric fuckton of lithium into him for nostalgia's sake.

Best of all, he returned our last assignment -- after failing to give us any feedback on our topic choices before it was due, and only giving us twenty minutes of in-class workshop time -- and gave practically everybody bad grades on it. Even though the stories he graded badly were almost all written to match the specs he'd given us, so wtf. Before the Toxic Attitude Spill killed every free-range Warm Fuzzy left in that room, I was planning on doing a rewrite for him in spite of being all "wait, what? I wrote it this way because this is what you asked for..." but after a lot of thought last night and this morning -- and a quick check-in with the college to make sure dropping the class wouldn't fuck with my academic standing or financial aid standing -- I decided that it wasn't worth knocking myself out for that class when I could be expending that effort in other things where I'm getting positive returns.

One of my classmates and I take (or, now, took) the same bus home at the end of the day, and we were ranting about the situation in the class. I was so upset about it -- although I really thought I was calm at the time -- that I almost got on the wrong connecting bus at one point and almost missed the right connecting bus at another. As a depressive, it's way too damned easy for me to internalize that kind of toxicity, so I am out of there. For the sake of my mental health, it's the only choice I can make.

For the most part, I feel a thousand times better. Now I just have to get over this twinge of "quitter!" guilt that keeps popping up. Just because I deserted the sinking ship, that doesn't make me a rat. Then again, rats are damn smart.

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So my desktop is planning its demise. The last few times it's booted up, it's switched itself on, off, on, off, and then finally booted on the third startup. This does not bode well, and I'm very annoyed with myself for having bought something that could be in this predicament at the ripe old age of 2 1/2. Not that it was ever the best machine -- the power supply fan died within 6 months and had to be replaced once I figured out that the rare times I heard it screeching were the only times it was running at all, and then I also had to upgrade my video card because the on-motherboard chipset was too weak to handle my video editing proclivities. Oh, and the DVD-RW drive refuses to read CDs anymore. So. More reasons to drink another big serving of Apple Kool-Aid just as soon as my wallet can afford a glass.

I'm going to get a Mac Mini. That will let me keep using my current monitor/tv and other peripherals until I need/want/can afford to replace them. I should be able to afford it sometime in mid-April, after I get paid for my work at the film festival. Hopefully this desktop will wheeze along until then, but I am backing up every night, just in case, and my Toshiba laptop is standing by to take over for the interim if need be. But I truly am done buying new Windows stuff. Toshiba's been awesome but so many of the other companies have been cutting corners like mad and pretending not to.

But I mentioned a wow, didn't I? That would be the Atomic Web Browser. I'm using that instead of Safari on my iPad, and I love it to bits. Control freak that I am, I really do love programs that let me customize them. And block ads. Also, I have managed to send off a few boxes of paper for recycling, without losing any of my notes from classes, by putting my annotations on the .pdf versions, all of which are stored in my iPad. I have been decluttering like a maniac as a result, and it feels great. I'm getting back so much space! If all goes REALLY well, in a few months maybe I can even give up my storage unit. I would purely love that.

Okay, stuff to do!

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Okay. I just downloaded the pilot of Awake on iTunes. It's free right now, and it'll actually be premiering on Thursday, March 1 on NBC... and it's amazing. So anyone who has an iTunes account, you need to go download it and watch because omfg it's a brilliant show and I can't wait for more episodes.

Imagine straddling two alternate realities, and switching between them. In both worlds, a terrible accident took one of the most important people in your life. But in each world, it was a different person. In both worlds, you're working on solving a terrible crime. But in each world, you have a different partner, the crimes are different... but there are all of these little connections between them, words, phrases, witnesses, perpetrators, that result in the clues from one world solving the case in the other world. And just... wow. It's seriously a work of genius. Go download the pilot. Heck, if you don't actually have an iTunes account, sign up to get one just for that. It's so amazing.

I'm really hoping it's a big hit, because it's already blown me away.

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...and I am still in love with its awesomeness.

I have all of my notebooks for the semester digitized now, and Note Taker HD is the most awesome thing ever for letting me write neatly, legibly, even elegantly in them. If a classmate misses a lecture, I can make a PDF out of the pages of notes that I took that day and email it to her. I have iAnnotate PDF for the handouts my "Gender Performance in Film" professor gives us in lieu of a textbook, which lets me mark up the handouts, make notes in the margins, etc. without ever printing anything out. Reading on this thing is easy.

This is my first Apple product since I bought a Mac 20 years ago -- I then ended up living with a guy who was very PC-oriented and, during a period of time when I couldn't afford to buy computers of my own, I kept inheriting his when he upgraded again and again and again, so I fell out of the whole Apple/Mac world and have only just found my way back into it -- but it's definitely not going to be my last. I suspect the order is going to go: Mac Mini, iPod, MacBook Pro, iPhone. In order of what I can reasonably afford and justify. But the difference is just stunning.

( So, my app recs so far: )

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zOMG this is lovely. I've only had it for a few hours and I already think it's one of the best decisions I've made in my life. I got one with wifi so that I can use it pretty much any time, anywhere. And I am just... In love. It does everything so cleanly, and so easily. I'm still customizing it and experimenting with it, but I'm already past all of the sticking-points that were bogging me down with the Dell after several days. The ONLY hitch I ran into was that at first my home wifi didn't want to talk to the iPad, but one short service call to AT&T later, a service tech had remotely changed our router settings and that problem was gone. It's been smooth sailing ever since!

I will probably still get it a keyboard, for longer typing sessions, but so far I barely need that. This is just... the very definition of easy. Plus omg app love. When the film festival starts at the end of next month I am going to be so beyond ready. And not that I really needed a push in that direction, but I am totally using the money I get for working there to buy a Mac Mini, and take yet another step in my conversion process.

iLove this thing. ;)

Edit: Apparently I was so gushy I didn't type something properly... I didn't just get wifi. I got 3G, too. That's why the "any time, anywhere." I am still floating, though. But a little more coherent. They really are not kidding when they say "there's an app for that." BRB lost in an electronic labyrinth of delight.

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Amazon is refunding me in full for the Dell. :D

iPad, I'm coming for yooooooooooooooooooooooou!

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I have no idea who just tried to connect with my MSN account, but just so everybody knows, I'm kinda tight with that thing. If I know who's asking, I'll probably say yes, but when total strangers ask for access out of nowhere, I'm going to deny. If I just denied someone I know on here, sorry about that; I didn't know it was you. But it's a good idea to give me a heads-up before doing so, since otherwise my kneejerk response is probably going to be "WHO GOES THERE? *DELETE*"

Anyway, no idea if it was a random spammer or an actual friend. But I thought I'd mention it here just in case I just accidentally hurt someone's feelings.

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I just had a bit of an odd thought and, even though I really ought to be going to bed right now, I wanted to write it up, because these last few days I’ve been doing a lot of re-evaluating of life, and this brought some things into better focus for me. Weirdly enough, it has to do with Harry Potter.

( Long-winded ramblings about losses of innocence, descents into darkness, over-identification, and all kinds of other weird shit )

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I have shipped the netbook/tablet back to Amazon. Here's why. Once I get a refund I'm saying "fuck it" and drinking the Apple kool-aid (which is tasty, if somewhat expensive, but I think this has been a case of me being "penny-wise and pound-foolish"). iPad, here I come.

P.S. LJ friends, in seven days' time I will be switching off commenting in that journal. Please to be friending me on IJ or DW if you want to reply to my posts. :)?

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Okay, first, a new rule for Ardath: not allowed to set up new electronics during the first day of Shark Week. Not that I knew it was going to be the case, but the rule still applies from now on. Because my brain is totally trying to insist that the stumbling blocks I've run into are The End Of The World, but really, no they're not.

So. The first problem I've run into is that the stylus I bought is a cheap piece of crap, and its tip keeps trying to come out when I use enough pressure for a consistent screen reading. Already solved: two more contenders are on their way and should arrive Friday, and if they aren't to my liking, a third contender can be here by early next week. There's another, connected issue, because Windows insists on giving feedback every time you touch the screen. It's this cute-looking ripple effect, as if you touched the surface of a pond -- little concentric circles that go out. The problem is that bit of feedback gets in the way of accurate input-recording. My stylus might be a lot easier for the tablet to read if the tablet didn't keep stopping to tell me "Oooh, you touched me again! And AGAIN! And look at that, you touched me AGAIN! Should I record this?"

This is something that can be disabled, though. I just have to find out how. For higher versions of Windows 7, there's a program called gpedit.msc that controls it; I will have to locate the equivalent settings within Windows 7 Home Premium. This is doable, but not when I'm in Spazzy Crybaby Mode. So it will wait for the weekend and I'll just push forward with what DOES work, until then. No point in trying to solve problems while you're temperamentally incapable of doing so, right?

The other thing that's frustrating me is the way it screws around with windows, and my desktop icons, when it swaps back and forth between portrait mode and landscape mode. Again, I am pretty sure that I can find a fix for this, when I'm in a better frame of mind.

I'm reminding myself again and again that all of these issues are software/OS issues and that this is why a lot of people complain about Windows 7 tablets (and why Windows 8 is so eagerly anticipated by tablet enthusiasts). And that I'm going to have all of my favorite programs on this little baby, and room for all (56+ gigs) of my music, along with the other things I'm convinced I can't live without. And that I know how to fix most of this stuff, and know how to find expert help for the rest. It's a good machine; I'm just in a far too shitty mood to appreciate it right now.

I didn't realize that until I nearly bit my mother's head off for making friendly small talk at me when I went into the kitchen. So for the rest of the night, and the next 48 hours, I am recusing myself from everything stressy. Bring on the kittens.

Thank GOD my first class tomorrow involves watching Morocco. I'm not also spazzing over Literary Theory readings at the same time as all of this. XD

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So far, so good. It's interesting. A bit larger and heavier than my old netbook -- same size screen, but then an additional frame around that so that it can flip around for tablet mode -- but still smaller than my 13.3" laptop. The chiclet keyboard is pretty nice, although I think I want to see if anyone makes a skin for it so that it has a little extra protection. I like that most of the casing is matte, and the outside is even rubberized in places; that makes finger marks less obvious, along with the inevitable dust and cat hairs.

I'm still in the process of installing software and customizing the look and feel. It's amazing how small things can be on this screen, and just how dense the pixels are on it. On my 22" 1080p monitor, I really can literally see the pixels on the screen (I have very good eyes in that regard) but on this screen, they're just too small for that. But everything is crisp and clear, and so far there's no eyestrain. Should any start, I can size things up a little for this screen, I'm sure. I wouldn't recommend this particular model to someone with vision troubles, though.

The touch screen is something that I'm getting used to quickly, although I'm annoyed as hell by the capacitive stylus I bought. i would really like one that was more precise. Some of this, I think, is that I'm a very light-touch writer on paper, and I want to replicate my writing style with few conscious changes on the tablet. When I do my S, for example, it's a sweeping little movement that the tablet is having trouble tracking so far. (Really, this is true of all of my curved letters, which it keeps reinterpreting as boxy monstrosities.) A capacitive stylus is a bit like a synthetic version of a squishy, meaty little finger, and I have a feeling I'm going to have to fool with settings a lot, and probably try out a few different brands of stylus, to find one that the screen reads properly.

This week is all about setting it up and working the kinks out. Next week, it will start traveling with me. I'm hoping that, by then, I'll be comfortable enough with note-taking on it that I won't be lugging all of my current notebooks with me to classes; that alone will make it worth every penny. And hopefully once I tweak things, it'll be a pleasurable drawing experience, too. I've missed drawing the way I used to.