The Things You’ll Find June 2, 2008

In preparation for the carpet project (see previous post), I have decided to thoroughly clean out my room.  I figure the more stuff I get rid of now the less I’ll have to move when we get the new carpet.  As I was rifling through the various detritus from the past few years it became obvious how long it had been since I performed such a task.

Buried in a pile of various electronics chargers was my GameBoy Color.  I haven’t played this in ages.  Inside of it was my Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets game.

Along the same lines, I also found my Bop It Extreme.  I remember when they came out with the first Bop It when I was in elementary school.  Someone brought one to recess and we all played it.  My parents didn’t want me to get one since they can become very annoying to listen to.  Then they came out with the Bop It Extreme and I asked my aunt for it for Christmas.  She got it for me.

Even more interesting was the various junk from school.  I found a few binders full of various papers from junior and senior year of high school.  That was 2 and 3 years ago, which shows how long it’s been since I cleaned my closet.  I found a report card from junior year, my SAT admissions ticket, cards from my 16th birthday (junior year), my temporary learner’s permit, film negatives from photography class, my entire math binder from senior year (which got dumped in the recycling shortly after I found it), my senior research paper, and my first ever piece of fan fiction.  This was actually a school assignment.  In junior year I had to write a fan fic about Of Mice and Men. I looked at the grade and I got a 95 on it and my teacher wrote ‘This is great!  Wonderful job.’  I am sure that is the only assignment that I got that written on it.  Most of the assignments that year were essays about boring books that I never got above a 90 on.

Another relic I found that got unceremoniously dumped in the recycling was my chemistry review book.  This was from junior year.

Along with my Chemistry reference tables.

And last but not least my US History review book from senior year.

Believe it or not these were not the most interesting items I found.  I also found my journal from Creative Writing in senior year.  I really liked that class because I enjoy writing as long as it’s something I want to write about.  I rifled through it and found multiple story ideas and various poems.  I’ll highlight a few here, but am going to save most for future posts.  My favorite one by far was from May 1, 2006.  It’s a list of stuff I didn’t like on that particular day.

-George Bush                       -Homework                         -Traffic Jams

-Getting up early                  -Regents Exams                  -This assignment

-Gas prices (this made me    -Freshmen boys (my bro     -Slow people in the halls

laugh, gas was just under      was a freshman that year)   -Middle schoolers

$3 at that point)                    -Slow Computers                 -People who walk on the wrong side of the hall

-Double physics                   -School laptops                    -Gym class

I am not sure what the purpose of that assignment was.  I didn’t even know what it was a list of until I read it.

Another favorite is this-

‘I would love to see George Bush put in jail.  I think he is one of the worst presidents.  He has done illegal stuff like domestic spying and the CIA leak, but he hasn’t been impeached.’

That’s all for now.  I’ll post more of my journal at some point.  Stay tuned for further updates on the room cleaning as well.

Welcome Back Friends! June 1, 2008

I used to watch Friends everyday, back when it was on FOX every evening.  This started shortly after we got rid of cable and were down to four channels.  I absolutely love Friends and was hooked immediately.  I’m sure I’ve seen almost every episode.

Unfortunately, shortly after they stopped showing new episodes, FOX changed their evening lineup and Friends was no longer shown.  I was quite angered about this, especially since it was replaced by another episode of That ’70s Show and Everybody Loves Raymond.  Thus, for the past couple of years, I have had to go without watching numerous Friends reruns due to my lack of cable television and FOX’s poor choice of evening sitcoms.

Then, they decided that all TV was going digital and we would have to buy some kind of converter box for both our TVs if we had any hopes of watching any TV after February 2009.  Last week my parents and my bro went out to buy the boxes.  My bro installed them and we were all thrilled to find that we now get around four more channels.  We have no doubled the amount of channels we receive.  One of these channels is some kind of FOX subsidiary called MyTV.  For a long time, I have been wishing we got this channel for the sole reason that they show two episodes of Friends every weekday.  Life is good, I now get to watch an hour of Friends almost everyday.

Bang For Your Buck May 28, 2008

Last night my dad decided to order cell phones for my bro and one of my sisters.  My sister wants the Sony Walkman and it costs $30.  She was willing to pay for it because she wants an MP3 player and $30 is pretty cheap for an MP3 player.  My bro found some kind of fancy phone for free and was trying to convince my sister to look at free music player phones.  She agreed to look and found one that looked nice but my brother didn’t think it was as nice as his.  Hence the conversation that followed.

Bro-  You don’t want that one.  Get this other one, it’s cheaper.

Dad-  But they’re both free.

Bro-  Yeah, but with this one you get more bang for your non-existent buck.

Nevertheless, my sister went with the Walkman.  But my dad had to upgrade our plan first and can’t order the phones until the new plan kicks in in June.

What a Harry Potter Dork I am… April 30, 2008

Today, after I dropped my sister and her friend off at dance class, I went to the library.  My main reason for going was to try sending emails with their wireless network.  I recently set up Thunderbird email on my laptop, and for some strange reason I have not been able to send emails using this on my school’s wireless network.  It works perfectly fine at home, but not at school.  So my dad told me test it at the library and see if it would work there.  It did.  I’ve got no idea why it won’t work at school.

Anyway, while I was there I decided to see if they had the 4th Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants book.  They did and I got it.  I also decided to check and see if they had Deathly Hallows on CD, since I never finished listening to it when I last checked it out.  Sadly, they did not.  However, they did replenish their supply of Harry Potter bookmarks!

A couple of months ago, they had a pile of HP bookmarks in the children’s section.  There were 7 different kinds and I took 2 of them, one of each kind they had.  Today, I noticed that they had three of the ones I did not have.  I was so excited!  I now have numbers 1, 2, 3, 6, and 7.  I only need 2 more and I’ll have the whole set.  But I’m not sure if I’ll ever find them since these are leftover from the book release last summer.  But anyway, this made my day.  They’re cool bookmarks.  They each have a different question on them, such as ‘Who will live?  Who will die?’ and ‘Will Voldemort be defeated?’  I now have 3 new bookmarks to add to my extensive collection of Harry Potter stuff, yay!

Even My Caluculator Doesn’t Like Calculus April 21, 2008

Yesterday before work I was doing some calculus homework.  We have a big test on Wednesday and I’m not ready for it.  I typed an equation into my calculator to find the limit of it was (if you don’t know what a limit is, consider yourself lucky) and the calculator tried to find it.  It’s a TI-89 Titanium, a really expensive calculator that can do all the stuff we do in class that we’re supposed to do by hand.  Anyway, it spent about 30 seconds trying to find the limit, before I gave up.  Usually it’s instantaneous.  So I gave up and decided to do the whole Windows thing and turn it off and back on again.  It didn’t like that either.  I had to try and turn it off numerous times.

Then, it didn’t even turn off.  It just came up with a new message I hadn’t seen before- ‘Error:  Break’.  I just started laughing.  The limit was so insanely difficult that it broke the calculator.  It just could not do the limit.  It’s not like the calculator is really broken, it still does problems that aren’t incredibly difficult perfectly fine.  I just thought it was hilarious that I got an error message that said it broke.  Calculus has gotten to the point that even my calculator has given up.

Free Upgrade April 7, 2008

My parents decided to get my bro and one of my sisters cell phones, so we were looking at the ones that they could get for free. I realized that I’ve had my phone for over 2 years so I’m eligible for a free upgrade. I really like the Sony Ericsson Walkman and that’s one that you can get free with a plan.  I assumed it was also one I could get for my free upgrade.  But then my dad logged onto his account and showed me the phones I could get for free and the Sony wasn’t one of them!  It would cost me $50 to get it.  Which isn’t worth it since I already have 2 MP3 players.

The ones that I could get for free are a Sony Z310a which I don’t really like a whole lot, or the newer version of mine (Nokia 6085).  I currently have a Nokia 6102.  There’s a couple others that I don’t really like, too.  So I’m not sure if I’m going to upgrade or not.  I like the phone I currently have, the only thing I’d change about it is its lack of blue tooth.  The 6085 has Blue tooth, which is why I might get it, that and the cool pink color.

Meanwhile, my bro or my sister might get the Sony Walkman.  Neither of them have decided what they’re getting yet.

New Computer March 27, 2008

My dad had been looking for a new desktop for a while. Our old one is really slow. You can hardly run 3 programs at once without it not working right. So he started looking for a new one. He found a used one on Craigslist. It’s a Dell, and he wasn’t going to get another Dell, but this one was really nice. A computer programmer bought it new less than a year ago and upgraded it a lot. I call it the Uber-Dell. It was only $450, so he went to see it and decided to get it. It was a really great deal.

It has 2 hard drives, each one 500 GB. So it’s a Terabyte of hard drive space. Plus it has 3 GB of ram.  It also has a DVD burner and a DVD drive. I don’t know why the guy put both in, but it works for us. My dad was originally only going to buy a new computer, but not a monitor, keyboard, etc. But this one came with a 17″ LCD monitor, keyboard, optical mouse, speakers, and subwoofer. The great part is, I get the old speakers and a mouse to go with my laptop.

I haven’t tried it yet, but my siblings say it works well. I don’t even have an account on it yet. It came with Windows XP and my dad put Linux on it. I’ll probably try it out within the next few days. My bro says it’s pretty fast. I guess I no longer have the fastest computer in the house. Here are some pics of it.

The whole set-up (sans new speakers, these are the old ones).

The Actual Computer Part

The Monitor

We set up the old one in the basement. It can’t connect to the Internet down there because it doesn’t have a wireless card, but it can still do other stuff. It looks really funny because there are 2 other old computers down there that are in partway taken apart (my bro likes to take computers apart).