The very random adventures of a psychology student, geeklet and all-round dork.


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A girl like you

Updates have been a bit sparse here lately, and that's because my life has been remarkably unremarkable.

Basically, I go to work twice a week, stress over administrative matters concerning my experiment (more testing coming up tomorrow), work on some other people's impossible experiment from hell, and hang out. It's too damn cold here. I wait for March, when life will once again get more interesting with school and other stuff.

While organizing my testing at my former junior high school this week, I got one of the coolest compliments in my recent history. I ran into my first Latin teacher, a slightly oddball older fellow whose methods have been feared by generations of students. Over recent years the school has lost a lot of students, especially the more academically inclined variety, to other schools in the area. He stopped for a minute to ask how I was doing, and I returned the question. He sighed.

"As always, I guess. I miss having students like you."

And strangely enough, that just made my day.

Tonight my brother informed me that he and his wife are taking me to see Il barbiere di Seviglia at the National Opera next month. I'm not sure whether it's a birthday gift of sorts or just one of the cool things he does, but either way it's really, really nice. I'm very excited. :D

posted by Godiva at 3:26 PM

 

Get unconscious, honey

My experiment is up and running. The first batch of data was collected in 5 solid hours of testing at my old high school.

And this is making it sound a lot easier than it was. I spent around 10 hours each this Monday and Tuesday, and most of the weekend, getting the whole sorry affair to work. I hit my limitations left and right. I know next to nothing about PHP and database structures. I've determined to start learning as soon as the thought of it no longer makes me feel nauseous.

I love my computer; even coding HTML has something of a relaxing effect on me. I don't recall many occasions where I actually got fed up with the whole thing. I still learned a lot this week, and I'm somewhat proud of the whole thing, even if it took a massive team effort on some parts.

Right now, however, I just feel endlessly exhausted well beyond what actually seems justified. When I got back from my hometown yesterday, I slept for most of the afternoon and almost 10 hours the same night. I'm still in a scary state today: I've repeatedly found myself angry at friends for minor offenses like showing up late to an agreed meeting, and feeling intensely inadequate about an assortment of totally pointless things. I'm actually trying to lure my squash partner into playing tomorrow. It could be quite a game.

Don't stick it out unless you intend to use it

Yeah, so I swallowed a titanium ball (courtesy of my own tongue piercing, thankyouverymuch) for the first time yesterday. GG girl. I swear there's some kind of galactic justice triggered by the words "... but I don't know who does _that_ sort of stupid shit".

Titanium isn't all that tasty. The fluoro balls need to get here sometime soon.

Tomorrow (or actually today, considering the current time of day) is Valentine's day. I'm still trying to decide whether to go out and buy myself dark red roses, just because I can.

posted by Godiva at 4:45 PM

 

...

So I figured this blog deserved an update, yet I couldn't for the life of me think of a title. Which is pretty pathetic if you ask me.

My life's been extremely hectic recently. As far as the PHP code for my experiment goes, I've been employing the well-tested and psychologically approved technique of muddling through to get stuff done. Of course, it didn't help that a significant portion of the experiment got completely redesigned in a three-hour session with my advisor on Thursday because the originally intended priming method fails spectacularly. It's much more interesting now, but unfortunately this also means a good deal more work.

I brought Sheila home on Tuesday, and have been busily reinstalling and reconfiguring things ever since. I wasn't even aware just how much stuff I use all the time. The system is running beautifully, though I'm already somewhat low on disk space and OfficeXP has been a real mixed blessing so far: It's extremely pretty and comes with a bunch of fairly cool functions, but overall I think I prefer not to be treated as a total idiot by default. I think I can choose for myself which e-mail attachments I'd like to open or not, thankyouverymuch. (These are all just random notes, of course. I probably just need more time to do battle with the whole thing.)

I finally caved last night and ordered a bunch of shorter barbells for my tongue. It's a very, very happy tongue, but I get too much tooth-to-metal contact entirely. It's almost turning me off my long-practiced bad habit of sticking out my tongue at people when they act pissy >;)

Hmm. More stuff later this week, I guess.
posted by Godiva at 10:53 AM

 

To each her own

My friend Ina's baby boy was born today. All went well. I'm happy for her, excited and a little frightened. I wish Ina, her husband and their little boy all the happiness and love they can possibly take.

*sniffles*

As the newly rebuilt Sheila is being backed up and reinstalled somewhere across the city, I feel not wholly unlike a nervous, overexcited first time father-to-be chainsmoking in a 1950s maternity ward's waiting room. I hope to have my own baby of sorts back here by tomorrow afternoon. It's the only kind I intend to have for the foreseeable future, and it never spits out its dinner.

OK, I'm being lame tonight. I'm going to bed now.

posted by Godiva at 3:10 PM

 

My motherboard, my...

... ah, screw the cliches.

My primary computer is at my ex's place. In pieces. The motherboard has been declared dead. I'm going out first thing tomorrow morning to buy an Abit NF7-S.

This will be a minor upgrade of sorts, so I'm throwing in a new LG DVD/CD-RW combo drive which will replace the sucktacular Plextor CDRW I've had for half a year or so, and which will in turn be handed down to some poor unsuspecting secondary box. Perhaps it'll do better in an IDE system; then again, it may really just be that bad. Oh, and I'm giving the YeongYang case that has hosted Sheila (yes, my computers have names, thank you) all this time back to my ex, and getting a bigass Supermicro case from him to replace it. This will probably require some rearrangement of my desk, since Sheila will be too big to fit underneath the printer. Ahh, I already look forward to it.

Visiting my old apartment always puts me in geek lust overdrive. My ex's primary box is a dual Athlon, full SCSI system in a plush little aluminum CoolerMaster case, and his fileserver appears to be up to some 700 odd GB last I heard. None of the stuff he has is anything I strictly need - or anything he really needs, for that matter - but damn, sometimes I just want to worship the sheer geek appeal of it all. We made semi-vague plans for me to buy his SCSI scanner off him, and may potentially make some sort of deal to exchange my old computer (ancient Celeron) for one of his P3 systems. As it is though, I will just be glad if our EE/CS major and geek friend can just stitch Sheila back together for now. I love that computer dearly, probably more than could strictly be considered normal. Oh, and I was attempting to do some minor statistics and web design work earlier tonight and was made painfully aware of the limitations of a 3-year-old Celeron. I want my Athlon, my Office, my music and my pr0n. ;P

On a completely unrelated note, I got a message from my friend Ina (the girl I was talking about in the "Pasta!" update) earlier tonight. Seems like the baby's on the way. I don't know what to say, so I'll just STFU. I hope all goes according to plan for her.

posted by Godiva at 4:17 PM

 

Everybody else's girl

I was going to write an update about the Tori Amos concert, but frankly I just haven't had the time. These days, everybody at my office just seems to jump on me whenever they need something or anything, and automatically assume I will get it done for them in under an hour no matter what it is or what I am doing at the time. Work has thus been insane, and I'm working on three online experiments at the same time. I just got done for the day, and I've come nowhere near as far as I was hoping to. Tomorrow will mostly be spent bonding with the geeks who will hopefully work some magic on my main computer and help get her back in working order. I've been working on my old 533 Celeron, Win98 SE and StarOffice all month. This must stop.

To extend the list of totally inconsequential things I get to talk about here just because nobody's going to stop me, I got to relieve stress today in a concentrated bout of retail therapy. Among other things - hey, there's a sale on ;) - I picked up a pair of grade A bitch boots at Esprit. I don't think I've ever worn four-inch heels before, yet they're surprisingly comfortable. I've always enjoyed randomly changing things about myself that I take for granted - height works pretty well in that respect. And hell, boots make me happier, it's odd but true =)

Tori Amos, by the way, is nothing short of amazing. I've never seen or heard anything like her. Most uncharacteristically, she played with a band - well, drums and bass, that is - and included a number of older songs such as Girl, Little earthquakes, Cornflake girl, Caught a light sneeze and, amazingly, what may be two of my favorite songs ever, Honey and Winter. I may write more about the concert one of these days, but right now I'm more tempted to cut the babbling short and just drop into bed.


posted by Godiva at 5:56 PM