Please Let it be the Ram

I took my iBook to the Apple store the other day to have the ‘geniuses’ take a look at it.  The guy turned it on and opened a bunch of programs, which got it to start blinking.  That was good since I thought I’d get it there and it would act fine.

After watching it blink for a little while and looking up how much ram was being used, he said it could be one of two things.  Most likely it’s the logic board, which would cost $800 to fix.  Or, it could just need more ram, since it blinks more when I have a lot of programs open and even when I only have my basic programs open (Firefox, NeoOffice, Adium, and Thunderbird), there’s only about 5 to 8 MBs of unused ram.

I found 1 GB of ram on Newegg for $31 plus free shipping.  I’m going to order it and my bro can install it for me.  Even if it doesn’t work, it’s not a whole lot of wasted money.  If it does work, then I can keep this computer, buy a new battery and it’ll be fine.  My battery is only lasting a little over an hour now, but I don’t want to buy a new one if I have to get a new computer.

There were some really nice MacBook Pros at the Apple store.  I had fun messing around with those when I was waiting for my genius appointment.  But they’re so expensive.  One day, when I’m rich, I’ll get one.

IT Help

My iBook has been blinking randomly for the past few days.  My dad thinks it is because the logic board is broken and the people on the Mac forum I’m on agree.

Today I took it to the IT help desk at school just to get another opinion.  I explained the problem and the guy working there started looking something up on his computer.  A few minutes later he said, ‘I think it’s your logic board.’

I said, ‘Yeah, that’s what the people on the Mac forum said.’

Him:  ‘Are you AppleDuck?’ (That’s my username on the Mac forum).

Me: ‘Yeah’.  Then I glanced at his screen and saw that he was on the thread I created a few days ago asking about my blinking computer.  Yup, he Googled the answer.

I called the Apple store and they do free diagnostics.  I’ll probably take it there and see how much it will cost to fix.

That Would Be Why I Type Things

Today in Creative Writing my teacher had us re-write parts of one girl’s story.  The teacher went around the room reading what everyone had written.  One guy told the teacher his writing was really messy.  The teacher said it didn’t matter and he could read anything.

He had looked at most people’s stuff and then asked if there was anyone’s he hadn’t seen.  I raised my hand and he came over to me.  I handed him my notebook.  He looked at it for a little while and then said, ‘This is really messy.’  I said, ‘I know.’  Then he read part of what I wrote aloud since he liked it.  He read a bit more to himself and then said, ‘I can’t read this’ and handed it back to me.

So much for being able to read anything.  I know my handwriting is atrocious.  I got voted worst handwriting in my English class last semester.  I can’t even read my own notes that I take in class.  That’s why I type pretty much everything.

Broken Printer

The other day my dad and I were in the family room.  My youngest sister walks in complaining that the printer is broken.  My dad asked her, ‘What happens when you hit the print button?’

My sister says,  ‘Nothing.’  My dad gets up and goes into the office with her.  He spent ten or fifteen minutes trying to figure out what was wrong, but he couldn’t figure it out.

Then my brother comes home and asks them what they were doing.  My dad told him that the printer was broken and he couldn’t figure out what was wrong.  My brother started laughing and told him,  ‘That’s because it’s not hooked up to the desktop.  I hooked it up to my laptop.’

There was a usb cord going from my bro’s laptop to the printer across the room.  Neither my dad or my sister noticed it.   Looking back, it seems like an obvious thing to check first, to check whether the printer is actually hooked up to the computer.

1 Year Anniversary…A Little Late

I missed it.  March 13 was the 1 year anniversary of my blog.  It’s hard to believe it’s been a year since I spent two or three hours in my old school’s library trying out various blogging websites while I should have been studying.  I decided on WordPress after not liking FreeWebs.  Although I did turn my FreeWebs site into a fan fiction website.

I know I haven’t been updating lately, but I can’t really think of anything to post.  Life just isn’t very exciting at the moment.  It’s Spring Break and I slept until 11am today, which was nice.

The weather has been abnormally warm this week.  It was close to 60 yesterday and we gave Benny a bath.  Poor dog.  I come home for a week and give him a bath.

The semester is now half over, which is hard to believe.  The year has gone by incredibly fast.  It’s strange that I’ll only have a year left until I graduate after this semester.

Survey Fail

My school emailed me a survey to take about my opinion of residential life.  There’s a chance I could win a Wii, Nintendo DS, or GPS unit, which would be awesome.  I clicked the link to take it and burst out laughing at the first question.

First, I have never seen a gender question where ‘transgender’ is an actual option, but it does make sense.  There are people out there who are transgendered.

But ‘other’?!?!  I think I laughed for five minutes.  What else is there besides male, female, and transgender?  I am rather excited that I now have something to put on the Fail Blog.

Scantron Fail

Today we had a test in Research Methods.  It was our second test in the class and my teacher passed out scantron sheets like she had done with the previous test.  I proceeded to fill it out, realizing as I bubbled in the second ‘A’ in my name that I had put my first name where my last name was supposed to go.

I felt quite stupid when I asked the teacher for another one.  I’ve only been filling those things out for the past twelve years.

On a related note, the scantron sheets we use do not have a place to bubble in the ’0′ in the year.  There are two slots for the year, in which one would put a ’0′ and then a ’9′.  Under the column for the first digit, there is only a ’9′.   You’d think whoever made those scantrons would have thought to add a ’0′ along with the ’9′ for when the 90s were over.

You Know You Live in NY When…

It’s 45 degrees and people are walking around campus in shorts and throwing frisbees and footballs around.
It has been abnormally warm the past few days.  40-50 degrees, no snow.  Definitely not normal for March.  Today, it’s supposed to get close to 60.

I was walking back to my dorm today and the cleaning lady says to me, ‘It’s gorgeous today, isn’t it?’.  I said, yep, it sure is.  It was nearly 50 degrees, windy, cloudy, and a threat of rain.

Yep, you know you live in NY when 40-50 degrees, wind, and clouds consists of good weather that causes people to wear shorts.

We’re Killing a Forest

My Creative Writing teacher decided to make each of us print out 21 copies of our 8-10 page short stories.  I was quite surprised at this because normally the teachers make the copies for all the students.

Then I got to thinking, if each of us prints out 21 pages of a 10 page paper, that’ll be 210 pages per person to print out.  Multiply that by 21 and you get 4,410 pages.  That is a lot of paper!  Talk about killing trees.

My college tries to be ‘green’ by setting the printers to automatically print on both sides of a piece of paper.  But my teacher insisted on our stories being one-sided.  I asked him why.  He said it’s because he likes to look at all the pages at once instead of having to flip over the pages.

So, because of his personal preferences, we have to each print out 210 pages.  Our class will be wasting 4,410 pieces of paper.  They’ll all be gotten rid of at the end of the semester.  I’ll recycle mine, but who knows what other people will do.  If my teacher could just deal with flipping over the pieces of paper, we could cut the amount of paper in half.

I told my dad about this and he told me I should write a futuristic story about a world with no trees, because all the trees were chopped down in order to make paper for college classes.  He also said, “This is the 21st century.  Why doesn’t your teacher just have everyone email each other your stories and bring your laptops to class?”  I’m wondering the same thing.

Also, I wrote my story.  There’s a character named Alice in it.  I’ll try to post an excerpt within the next few days.