Monthly Archives: September 2006

Gigabank Premier 80

I bought an “I/O Magic Gigabank Premier 80GB Portable Storage Drive” last night. It’s an 80 GB USB powered external hard disk that’s pocket sized. It was about $100, and I’ve read mixed reviews online. Some people seem to like it. One person said that after accessing it for 30 minutes, it gets write failures. Another person said he used it extensively everyday for 10 months, and it worked fine until that time at which point there was a loud noise and it stopped working completely. So far, it’s worked fine for me. I’m not sure if I should keep it or return it.

Mantop

I’ve been wanting to reformat for a while, but I needed to make a data partition and move some of my stuff over. I guess I should have had two partitions for a long time. I was going to shrink my partition down and then make a new one. Well, I shrank mine down, but then Partition Magic had to stop because of an error. And the error message? “Too many errors.” So now my drive is much smaller. I look into it, and it’s because of errors with the hard disk, obviously. Can’t find any more information than that. I tried using chkdsk, but it found bad sectors and couldn’t fix them.
Then I noticed that Windows said I had 256 MB of RAM instead of 512 MB. I look inside Mantop and find that one stick is loose, but pushing it in doesn’t fix it. It seems that both sticks are good, but that one port might be bad. I kept fooling with it, and now I think both ports work, just the metal tabs on both ports are bent or screwed up or something. Sucks. I got the memory back in where it’s being held for the most part (although this has happened before and the RAM just seems to fall out). When I boot up, I get to the Windows XP screen with the progress bar, then I get a blue screen of death for an instance, and then Mantop reboots. Can’t get any farther than that.
Now Mantop is using a memory testing application from a Linux boot CD to check the RAM. It’s been going for over three hours, and I don’t know how long it’ll take in total. Hopefully it’ll finish soon. If it doesn’t, hopefully the battery will last for me to move it.

Getty Museum, The Stinking Rose

gem and I went to the Getty Museum yesterday. It was really fun. I’d never been to a real museum before, and I really liked it. The religious art bored me a little, which is ironic because that’s what most of it is. Still, there were a lot of amazing things. I also grew to like impressionist paintings a lot more. And the marble and bronze statues were really cool, probably my favorite. But the architecture itself is simply beautiful too. It was designed by Richard Meier and is outstanding. It feels like a palace or something.
After the museum, the two of us went to the Stinking Rose in Beverly Hills. It’s a restaurant specializing in garlic. Their motto is “We season our garlic with food.” We had amazing garlic spread with bread for an appetizer. Then I had the rabbit and gem had the chicken. And for dessert, we had garlic ice cream. The ice cream sounded a bit weird but ended up being really good. It didn’t really taste garlicy. It was just… spicy. Anyways, delicious!

Discovery Science Center

Today I went to the Discovery Science Center off the 5 in Santa Ana with gem. It was really fun. All the exhibits are science related (and made for kids, heh). There’s a wave generator, high wind chamber, geyser, tornado making machine, a bed of nails, and lots of fun stuff. The bed of nails left marks on me. Plus, there’s a Taco Bell inside. Pretty great, no? The volunteers were really friendly too. Fun day!

Merlin, Chronicles of Amber

This dream was basically based on some books I’ve been reading. You can skip the next paragraph if you want to see my comments on the books without reading my dream.
I had a dream the other night that my father (who was not my real father) was going away on business to either Egypt or Las Vegas. We (some friends and I) wanted to go with him so we cast a spell on our car to follow him. My friend wanted a girl across the street to come too so I called her and invited her, which was weird because I hated her roommate. She said okay. When it was time to leave, the car started flying to the place my dad was at. When we got there, we found the place to be really cool, and we wanted to be able to come back to it but knew we wouldn’t remember nor be able to get to it easily. I had an idea. I went to the library to talk to Merlin so he could make me a trump of the place. I started yelling out his name, realizing that most people would think I was crazy and talking about the fictional Merlin from King Arthur, etc, not the real one (who is, indeed, fictional). I couldn’t find him, but some fat little kid started making fun of me, saying that Merlin wasn’t real and magic didn’t exist. I floated in the air and choked him without touching him until he cried. And that was the end of the dream.
I guess I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about the novels. The Amber Chronicles, starting with The Nine Princes In Amber by Roger Zelazny. It’s a ten book series with two five book cycles (one being the original and the other written at a later time) about Amber, the one true city. Amber casts shadows, which are basically dimensions. For instance, we live in shadow. The series is about the royal family of Amber who have the ability to walk through shadow. There’s a lot of magic artifacts in it, magic casting in the second cycle, plotting, family intrigue, back stabbing, and a hell of a lot of sword fighting. It’s very good if you like sci-fi / fantasy. All ten novels can be found in The Great Book of Amber.

Black Man Face

When I was little, I once ran over to a black man, grabbed his arm, and started rubbing it. He kneeled down, looking at me, and I reached up and rubbed my hands all over his face. My mom ran over and started frantically apologizing. He asked her “am I the first black he’s seen?” My mom realized that he was. I was just amazed at his skin color.

Hey

I guess it’s time I post again. It’s been almost four months since the last time I made a post. School went well in the spring. I got an A+, A-, and a B+. I joined Tau Beta Pi, the engineering honor society. I don’t really think there was any reason to join other than to look good on paper. But, it wasn’t that much work to join anyways.
Working at Albertsons has been good. I got promoted a couple weeks ago so now I’m cashiering. It pays better. Ironically, I also put in my two weeks notice. There’s a lot of drama at Albertsons, and I’d rather work somewhere less stressful and time consuming. I’m taking a job in the Campus Village computer lab. Antonio already works there and says it’s great.
Since summer started, I hadn’t really been at my apartment… much… at all. I’ve been staying with my gf mostly. Herbert was going to rent my spot in CV from me but ended up finding somewhere better after it was too late for me to find someone else. He ended up paying for the rent for the month of June, and then I took over after that. I didn’t actually move in until a week or so ago because my lease at my old place didn’t end until August 31st. Everything, for the most part, is all unpacked, and I really like it there. Before I moved in, Andrew had a roommate named Ton who they apparently hated. He smoked pot in the house all the time, covering the smoke detectors, had sex in his room and the living room (thus locking people in/out of their rooms), and wouldn’t stop having large numbers of people over for parties, even after Antonio said he especially couldn’t since he worked for CV. Andrew called the cops on him eventually, and Ton was reassigned to a different apartment. He ended up being assigned to Johny’s place. Johnny lives in the same building as me and is a cashier at Albertsons too. He gets along well with Ton so I guess things worked out, because our replacement, Angel, seems like an alright guy.
During Summer Session I, I took CSE 70A – Network Analysis, which is a class on analyzing circuits. I heard it was really hard, and while it wasn’t impossible, I kept ditching class because I was so tired from work. I didn’t think I’d get a good grade so I bombed the final on purpose so I could just retake the class. In Summer Session II, which I’m still in now, I’m taking Anthro 2A. It’s actually really interesting. I think I enjoy it more than gem, Jin, or Tony, and that’s kind of surprising.
I bought a Nintendo DS Lite a few months back. I now have 10 games, and they’re all really good. I think the DS is a really great console, and I’m very glad I purchased it. I’ve also been playing Baldur’s Gate lately, although I’m not very far yet. For some reason, I could never get into Baldur’s Gate 2, but I’m really enjoying 1. Maybe after having played 1 I’ll like 2 more. I’ve also been playing Dungeons & Dragons a lot. Andy’s running a Forgotten Realms campaign in which I play a level 3 Paladin. It doesn’t seem like he wants to play much though because he always wants the whole group to be present. I also started a campaign in Eberron, which is a pretty interesting setting. I have 4 players, and it’s been fun so far.