It's snowing again outside

Transmetropolitan has rekindled my desire to be a journalist like Snow Crash made me want to be a pizza driver, all those years ago.
Only with more drugs.
Lots more.

What's the deal with this weather?

First, let me say that I found the process of returning a hard drive to the manufacturer for replacement isn't too painful, at least when you are dealing with Seagate/Maxtor. Now that my RAID array has been reduced to one drive, I formatted it and put XP back on but, WOOPS, while in the installation process my backup hard drive was formatted too. I'm not going to blame the program, but I have no idea how I accidentally chose to format all of my hard drives at once. Fortunately, there are handy programs out there that can recover data from just about anything. All that was lost from my RAID failure was every one of my pictures, which fell through the cracks when I was backing things up. Let this be a lesson!

Here is the SECOND time I lost power during the Bellingham wind storms. Luckily, Bellingham's finest took the precaution of putting a cone down by the downed power line. Good work, men! I understand pretty much everywhere in the Puget Sound area is snowy right now, but it's Wednesday and I have yet to go to class. W00t! Here's the lovely frozen Post Point Water Pollution Control Plant, taken while I was doing rounds today.
Here is the view from the lab in which I work, and part of the reason I love the job so much. That little inlet is partially frozen. You can't see it, but there are gulls walking around on it.

Review: The Fountain

I've been pondering this movie off and on for the past couple days. I've been going back and forth as the different sides of my brain battled: the side with opinions and taste, and the intelligent side that likes puzzles and also doesn't want people to think I'm dumb or uncultured for not liking an obviously deep, artsy movie.
Finally, I decided to look at some reviews and found one that perfectly sums up my feelings towards the movie, as said by Ethan Alter of Film Journal International:
The Fountain may be a deeply flawed film, but at least it is unlike anything else in mainstream theatres right now.

Thank you Mr. Alter. I can now rest easy.

Sweet lord, sweet lord...!

I knew this day would come, but why now?

The system was down

I don't know what the rest of Washington was like this past week, but it was pretty hellish up here in B'ham. Much wind, much rain. The power went out Wednesday in Fairhaven (and at the water plant plant!), so I went home and found I was without power there too.
No power=no computer, no TV, no radio. Oh well, I needed to do some homework anyway. Oh, wait, it gets dark at 6 and I don't have any lights. So, I headed to the library and study until about 9, then come back home to find my house is still dark, plus it's empty for the night: one roommate is at his gf's, the other went to the bars 20 seconds after finding out we didn't have power. He's a smart one. So, what's a guy to do except try to study by candlelight and take some low-light pictures?
Please take notice of the neon palm tree visible from my living room window. Most of the time I watched it flicker instead of paying attention to my book. It's hypnotizing, seriously.Luckily, the power came back on at 7am this morning, so I didn't have to shower at the rec center. As for the food in the fridge, the half n half was already expired by 5 days so I didn't feel too bad throwing it out. As for the milk and the cheese...well, whatever doesn't kill me gives me the intestinal fortitude of a concrete elephant.
Total time power was off: 20 hours.