sunrays and saturdays

The random epiphany for today:

I'm working on this homework set from hell for 518X, and it asks me to calculate the cross product of two three-dimensional vectors. That is just one of those things from Calculus that I voluntarily forgot upon finishing the course, so I had to go back to my Calc textbook to remember how to do it.

I look it up under the table of contents to find:

"The Cross Product.......pg. 666"



Suddenly it all makes sense. If there's a hell, vector calculus was spawned from it.

It's fucking freezing in here, Mister Bigglesworth. Leave it to the weather to cool way the hell off right after the heat gets shut off in my building. Such is my luck.

Yesterday was one of the laziest days I've had in months, and it was glorious. I did absolutely nothing that would be deemed productive except to try to help Jeremy with a tech issue over the phone for about two hours. His video card is not sending the display to the tv correctly (or at all, for that matter) even though it was working perfectly fine yesterday. When he tries to do it he loses the display on his primary monitor, too, so he has to reboot into safe mode to uninstall the drivers and get his display back. Then he reinstalls the drivers and tries to send the display to the tv again only to end up back at square one. He was pretty much going in circles for about three hours last night....all to play MLB 2004. Guys and their sports...

I did manage to replace the memory in my computer yesterday, and HOLY FUCK THE DIFFERENCE IS AMAZING. I had no idea my poor system was struggling so much with the 256 mb it had. Now it has 512 mb of DDR PC 2700 (I know it's not 4000 or something extremely top of the line, but it's a drastic improvement), and it is one happy camper. I reduced the page file size, too, so believe me when I say that the zippiness factor is very high with this computer. It's like the force in a way. Best Buy has those memory cards on sale for like $40 after a $30 rebate, so I'm sort of tempted to run back down there and get another one. If I were to upgrade to a gig of memory, I could cut down on the HDD's page file work even more. Plus, my webcam is still giving the computer fits. I have a decent processor in this thing (AMD Athlon XP 2600+), so I don't think that's the problem. I guess I could always be wrong, though. OH, and Best Buy is selling 80 GB hard drives for $30. That's CHEAP. I called Mom and told her about it while I was there, and I ended up picking two more up for her and Marty. :p Eventually I'm going to get around to putting a fresh hard drive and OS in this machine (hopefully set up a dual boot of Windows XP and Linux Red Hat). Now I have the hard drive, so I'm one step closer!

God I'm a geek, but it's so much fun to be me sometimes!

Before: http://www.meteor.iastate.edu/~mt206/windmill/oldforecasting.html

After: http://www.meteor.iastate.edu/~mt206/windmill/forecasting.html

I'd call it an improvement! I'm giving weather discussions and forecasts for a nonmajor meteorology course of about 200 students. As part of the course, they have to make at least 25 forecasts during the semester, and they will use this page to help them. When I took the course, I found the page very inconvenient to use, ugly, and I thought some of the recommended websites were useless. So...when they asked me to be their meteorology student lackey, I begged them to let me change the page, because there was no way I could use it to give the forecast discussion. It didn't take much convincing for them to let me fuck with it (gee, I wonder why). So, there you go. I at least find it much easier to use, and I'm hoping that the students will like it, too.

Dad just called me to tell me that I'm in the news! Ok, it's not that exciting. ISU sent out a press release to the Hutchinson News saying that I made the Dean's List for last semester. Grandma saw it and just had to tell Dad all about it. I'm actually kind of surprised that it made the Hutchinson paper instead of the Pratt paper (my actual hometown). The Hutch News reaches a wider audience, though, so everyone and their dog is going to know that I'm a nerd. Hell, my grandmother lives halfway across the state, and she knew about it. I'm famous! :p

Calling all people who run unusual browsers or low res displays!!! Go to this site and let me know how it looks to you. I've already tested IE, Netscape, and Mozilla, so unless you have ancient versions of those, don't worry about it. It's pretty basic code, but I suppose it's always good to check. I'm tossing around the idea of making the graphic bigger, but if it already takes up the whole screen on 800x600, I'll leave it alone.

These are way too much fun to play with when you're bored at work. Just push the little button and out pops the CD! Yeah, shut up. I'm easily amused.

Ok LJ style gurus, I need help. How do you make the background color of your posts transparent? I'm using a stylesheet system for my settings, so any div tags won't work. I need a line of code that will work in the css. Anyone?

Well, fuck, I'm taking that final afterall. I'm two measely percent points away from an A. I was starting to get used to the idea of not having to take that exam, too. Fuckity fuck.

I've officially converted from Windows Media Player to Winamp. It took me long enough. I even downloaded a sexy new skin for the Winamp player. It looks hot, it really does.

I could go crazy right now. Since I got the new motherboard put in, about the same time every night, a very high pitched tone has been emanating from my computer. When I mean high pitched, I mean competing with a dog whistle or feedback from a microphone. It's not really loud or anything, but it's at just the right pitch to give me a headache and make me feel like my ears are going to start bleeding. It's BAD. I'm not sure what it is. It could be a fan or anything. My cat is even startled by it.

Whew, it's gone for now. I can keep my sanity intact.

Guess who's online again!!!! Yeah, that's right. I finally have my computer up and running again. A new mouse and keyboard seemed to do the trick, although I'm very curious to know why neither of my mice worked before. It's a paradox. Anyway, I'm $250 poorer than I was last week, but I have my precious computer back.

....I also have a strawberry limeade in my possession. Mwaha.