In computer news... if you don't give a damn about computers, don't read this. Skip to the next entry.

anyway, I reformatted mine, because I have a pathetic P166 that I got practically minutes before MMX came out. 2.5GB hard drive, 32 MB RAM. And  in a moment of weakness, I had put WinMe on it.

Bad move. The bloody operating system alone takes up all of my RAM, so I'm going on virtual all the time. RAM requirements for Office 2000 under ME are 32 for the system plus 8 for each app open at once... and I routinely had WinME, Word, a few IE windows, AIM, Juno, AOL, AIM, and KaZaA, and/or various combos thereof, running simultaneously. Ugh. Plus my computer would freeze up for a second whenever it would make a sound- I ended up turning off all the sounds.

To add insult to injury, I was low in disk space, and not only does WinME not have DriveSpace, I couldn't convert to FAT32 with the nice convenient FAT32 converter. It would get bitchy on me because I have all of ONE bad sector or something. Also, I couldn't use System Restore, the only real advantage to WinMe, because it ate up hard drive space and left me with something ridiculous like 30 MB. (It would spontaneously turn itself on again after I turned it off, too.)

Complicating the matter of reinstalling is the detail that I can't use floppies because my mobo's screwed up.

So... I ended up tossing my HD on my mom's PC, backing up my stuff onto her HD, reformatting, FDisking (as a single FAT32 volume, not the 2 stupid FAT16 volumes I had before), format /s, throwing on it my backups and the Win98SE install files (courtesy of our school LAN and KaZaA), making a boot CD after the hard drive refused to boot, and.. it worked nice. A couple glitches getting the modem and Office 2000 to install, but it's all back now, except I forgot to back up the stuff on my desktop before I Fdisked, and I had Sarah's phone number in a file there, and I lost the scrap of paper I had it on originally. Damn. I'll have to hunt her down again. Hope she gets on IM soon.

So, once I get everything back, here's the impressive list of stuff I'll have crammed onto a 2.5GB drive:

Win98, Office 2000 Professional (minus Outlook and Frontpage because I never use them), Dreamweaver Ultradev, Photoshop 5.5, Pagemaker 6, Mathematica, a few games, AOL... and of course the essentials like KaZaA and Juno (with my 80 MB of old e-mails, of course) and DAP and AIM and so on. I can do everything except 3D stuff on this ancient computer.

Basically, this reformatting will help me keep my computational sanity until college. I want to wait until I get over there, wherever "there" end up being, before I buy a nice, new computer, because a) I won't really need it until then and b) pices are still dropping so I might as well hold out as long as I can and get a better one for the same price. I'll get a cheap laptop, too.

And if I can at all get away with it, I will NOT put @!#$@#$% Windows XP on it.

okay, I was suddeny inspired to actually updae this thing. because

a) I looked at Roman's blog, which is one hell of a rant, and

b) it occurred to me that I actually have stuff to write about today, which hasn't happened on the few occasions I've had an urge to update this thing.

So here goes.

*****College News*****

I got into Cal Poly SLO. I don't mean to sound like an arrogant bastard, but no big surprise there. They sent me an e-mail, with the subject line: You're In! and an image that I had to go online to look at because I just downloaded my mail with Juno as usual. The image was of some person jumping up in the air, thrown through a couple of Photoshop effects, and a little message saying something to the effect of, You're in! We'll send you stuff by snail mail, and click here to see the sccepted students weekend tour thingy info. It's in April so I guess I'll go, even though I won't be going there if all goes well. No offense to Cal Poly- it's just not my first choice.

And my first choice IS.....

Harvey Mudd. And I'm a finalist for the Nova Scholar award (translation: half tuition) so I'm going up there next weekend (including Monday) for some interview and tour thingy they have for the finalists.

Saturday: I go from the Sound festival in Riverside to the Sheraton in Pomona. There's some informal social thingy at 9:30 p.m. I hope they have ice cream, because I'll probably need blood sugar after being on the road since around 8 am.

Sunday: to condense the outline, we finalists get transported to HMC (which stands for Harvey Mudd College, for those who don't want to use any valuable brainpower at the moment), get a little tour, eat breakfast and get introduced to people, do "small group projects" (whatever the hell that means) and have lunch, have a break, an orientation for the afternoon stuff, faculty interviews, meeting our student hosts, some Humanities and Social Sciences department presentation and tour so they can impress us with how they're all Not Just Engineering Geeks and stuff (and no, it's not the total crock it might seem, especially with the other Clraremont colleges there), optional tour of the other Claremont coleges, dinner with hosts, study break in the Muddhole, and go to sleep in the dorms.

Monday: Breakfast, crash some classes, talk to faculty and students, go on another tour if your parents decide to go (which my parents will) since all the other stuff is finalists only, and go home.

And now I'll save this entry even though I have more to write because I'm paranoid about something going wrong and me losing this whole thing. (I should probably just do this in Notepad then, but... ah, screw it.)

I'm in an insanely good mood. Why? Because. Toni, you can figure it out. lol

Aside from that, the rest of my day seems a tad irrelevant. [insert rest of day here]

I had a sectional for Sound at 8 this morning, so I got up at 5 to call Toni. (If you do not see the logic in that, well... you should. :oP)

*******Warning: Do not play the VeggieTales song "I Love My Lips" anywhere near her.********

It's an odd song, and Maki's using it for a solo audition, so I had the dubious honor of learning to play it. The music on the CD's kinda twangy. It sounds like a banjo. The sectional went pretty well.

Went home, got my new toy (digital camera) and went to school for the photos, which weren't at school, but in Coronado on the beach. It took a while because there were two photos and then everyone had individual shots, and then there were some group shots, including the seniors, the band, and whoever else felt like forming a group and taking a photo together. I fiddled around with the digital camera.

At one point, everyone got together to sing The Star Spangled Banner, but there was no piano or anything else to give the starting pitch. I used my psychic powers and hummed what was apparently pretty close to a D, because it sounded right to everyone.

Then, more photos, and I filled up my camera a couple of times, went back and deleted photos, set it to low quality, et cetera...I owe a few people e-mailed photos now.

I was half asleep on the way back.

Look, it's a weblog! I'll update it when I'm inspired and/or bored. Now I've totally rewritten my short story for English, and I've ended up flipping the protgonist inside out personalitywise. Nice of me, isn't it?

Hi, Toni!

If you're not Toni..., oh, okay, hi to you too. lol ;o)