Finally

After a year, my Flickr has once again been updated.
Want to see a couple random shots of San Francisco? Look no further.

Nostalgia

If you want to see my childhood in a nutshell, watch this excellent 14 minute video.
Aside from eliciting nostalgia, this video also makes me wonder how the hell we actually convinced my parents to subscribe to Nintendo Power in the first place.

Why not?

Hey, everyone else is doing it.

Summer time

Summer is here, and spring quarter treated me pretty well. I was busy, but at a better pace than the last few quarters. The highlight had to be my marine invertebrates class. It kind of sucked having to drive down to Anacortes every Friday to go to class, but usually we took fun field trips. I also learned quite a bit in the class, and I felt like I was the only one starting from scratch when learning about marine ecology. I'm pretty sure I was the only one who didn't know what a polychaete was or what a tunicate looked like. Still, being on a boat in the San Juans beat the heck out of sitting in a classroom and looking at powerpoint slides. These seals show that I'm not the only one enjoying hanging out in the San Juans. Here's our very own little mini sub.It's remote controlled, and has a camera on it for maximum learning potential. I don't know what I actually learned, but it was still fun.On our last field trip, we went out to False Bay on San Juan Island. Half of our field trips were cruising around in a boat, the other half were spent digging things out of mud. Still good times, though, even with a wicked sunburn. In other news, my new Western Digital hard drive hasn't died yet, I'm still looking for an apartment I need to move into in 2 weeks, and I'm looking for a second summer job. I had an opportunity to work at Fred Meyer, but customer service+having to shave wasn't worth it. Maybe I'm just getting too picky.

Thanks, AWMA gonna need it

I am now officially the treasurer for (next year's) Huxley College chapter of AWMA. It's a pretty good deal, and a lot of people have gotten some really good jobs through networking whatnot.
We had a meeting down at Lakewood (WWU's lake property) where the people leaving the group met people who were interested in joining. I got the position by someone pointing at me and saying "Hey, are you good with money?"
Fate is a funny thing sometimes.

Oh, good...

I was starting to get tired of my computer working anyway. What good timing, with finals coming up. I'm glad I have to ship a hard drive to Seagate for a third time to get it fixed. I look forward to the fourth and fifth times too. Maybe they'll send me a prize my tenth time.

I find my life summed up yet again by stick figures in a web comic

Anna leaves for London tomorrow :(

On storytelling

Ira Glass vs Jack Black on how to tell a story.
Each tackle a different medium and take about 20 minutes each. Both are worth watching if you, like me, are bored.

The beginning of the end

I got my credit evaluation today, along with all the paperwork I need to apply for graduation. It looks like I'm all set to graduate in fall of 07 (mid December). It feels good to finally get a goal. I wasn't sure about how long I wanted to be in school and how many minors I wanted, but this quarter is really doing a number on me. Plus, after fall of next year I would be a 6th year senior. PLUS, I'm going to be 25 in the summer, and damn that's old (sorry to everyone who is reading this and older than 25. You know you thought it when you were my age).

Woe is me

It's been a crummy couple of weeks up here. It hasn't been the constant homework, I'm pretty much used to that by now. It started out pretty well...
*In late January I got my hard drive back from Seagate. I hooked it up and everything worked well. SWEET! I made a mirrored (redundant, great for data security!) array with my original Seagate and my repaired one, and this required me to reinstall XP. So I did. It seems, however, that there is a little fluke with XP installation: if it doesn't think one of your drives is formatted (enough) it will format it for you. It didn't think my 200 gig Maxtor was formatted, even though EVERYTHING I own in digital form was backed up on it and I used it not half an hour ago. So *zing* it formatted every drive I had lickety split and I was left with nothing.
Added to this is a little catch-22 that the nice people at ASUS built into their wireless motherboards: in order to use the wireless card, you need to install service pack one because it has the drivers on there. SERIOUSLY, when you insert the CD that came with the motherboard and click on install chipset drivers a text file just pops up and says "just install service pack one, dummy." That's just lazy. So, anyway, I was left with less than nothing.
I picked up my computer and moved it to my roommate's room so I could plug it directly into the modem and eventually got things sorted out. I also downloaded a data recovery program to try to salvage some data from my formatted drive. I had a little practice at this, since XP did this to me once before.
Long story short (too late!) I lost about 1 out of every 10 MP3s, programs, pictures, and videos. Lame.
*Ok, phew, got that sorted out--wait, what? My hard drive is failing again? Oh, no, this is just my SECOND FUCKING SEAGATE HARD DRIVE GOING OUT. So, it's now toast and I mailed it into the folks at Seagate to repair. What are the chances? I've never actually seen a hard drive fail before, and now BOTH of mine have gone out. Hmm.
*Let's face it, my wardrobe is just big enough to fit in one load of wash. Convenient and environmentally friendly! Not so convenient is when I washed a pen with my clothes the other day and ruined every piece of clothing I own. My plan at the moment is to work into every conversation how I dabble in art and that's why I have spots all over my clothes. It beats my other plan, which is just tie-dying everything.
I'm working on replacing my music collection at the moment, and it's slow going. One upside: I'll replace an album and listen to it, and I'll think "Damn, this sounds really good!" As it turns out, I really CAN tell the difference between 128 kbps and 256/FLAC, even on my little Boston Acoustics. All this time...

The cutting edge in environmentalism

I hope y'all can read this little bit of harmless--but hilarious--vandalism at the construction site of a new WWU facility.

Hands of blue

Sorry, this is all I've been up to for the past couple weeks, and it's what I'm going to be doing for the rest of the quarter. I spend my time working in 3 different labs, and the time between I try to get some writing in because I'm taking two writing-intensive courses. At least I'm pretty sure I don't want to do research when I grow up.
Also featured in the picture is my iPod, and now that I listen to it hour after hour each day silence has become kind of a novelty.

* I'm not sure why it looks like this is a mirror image. It must be a fluke of the phonetography.

Thank Christ the snow is gone

Anybody who thinks the snow is fun hasn't slid all over the fucking place just trying to get into your own driveway. Living on a hill seemed like a good idea at the time...Had my first day in the Bellingham water plant today. This is the place where we actually make the water, instead of just taking all the poo out. It's all pretty much the same job, but this lab smells better and I don't have to wear gloves as much. But then there's all that chlorine... I'm also taking an independent study course for one credit at Western. It boils down to me helping a grad student culture Daphnia magna, or water fleas. They're kind of cute little guys, which is why I feel bad for killing so many of them. You see, tonight it was my job to isolate all the big ones that are capable of reproducing and dumping the young ones/runts down the drain. I felt like kind of a monster, but I'm over it now.

Back to business

It's been a great break, but nothing lasts forever.

I for one welcome our new overlord

Sweet freedom

I had my last final on Friday, so all I've had to do up in Bellingham is work at the water plant. Well, work and finally play through Neverwinter Nights 2. I haven't allowed myself to be addicted to a game for a long, long time. There's something about staying up all night playing a game, then waking up early to start playing it again that reminds me of the good old days, before I had responsibility. I completely lost all track of what day it was, and probably wouldn't have shown up for work if Anna hadn't kept me in line.
I'll get through the game eventually, then life can continue.

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.