Author Archives: TheUser

Life

It’s been a while since I posted last so I thought I’d write something. School’s going well. I’m taking CSE 121, Software Tools & Methodologies, CSE 161, Design and Analysis of Algorithms, and Classic 170, Women and Gender in Antiquity. All three are going well. I’m not worried about any of them, although the CSE courses still have a bit of work to them. Women and Gender in Antiquity isn’t as bad as I thought it would be. In fact, I enjoy it. To talk about women, they must be compared to men, so we’re still taught about both genders. I guess I thought it would be sexist/feminist, but it isn’t.
Work is going well too. Most of it consists of logging people in an Excel spreadsheet when they come in, marking paper print cards when they print, and writing in the “convo log” each shift. Shift’s are 1.5 – 4.5 hours long for me on the week days and 6 hours long on weekends. We also have to attend “programs” and run them, write for the CV Chronicles, etc. Not too bad. I play a lot of video games at work.
My second anniversary passed last month. Everything’s going just wonderfully in that department. Apartmentmates are all good. I hardly talk to Angel. Andrew and I talk and watch tv together sometime, but we don’t really hang out. Antonio and I hang out quite a bit now, which is good. I don’t really see other people much. I see Andy and Duncan every month or so. I haven’t seen Vincent, Jon, or Gabby in months. I see gemma’s roommates when I’m at her place. It’s fun there, and I really like her roommates. I also haven’t seen Herbert or Edward in months, and I’ve kind of been meaning to. Also I haven’t talked to anyone outside of UCI much. Alex slightly online, Christine slightly online, William slightly online. Dev came to visit earlier in fall.
That’s life woo

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.