Those of you who know me are probably wondering at my tardiness here, so allow me to repent.
It's snowing!!!!
This makes me very, very happy.
Oh, and because I know you were all wondering, snowmobiling in 4 feet of powder is marvelous.
Friday night as I was using my laptop, (an Apple MacBook running OS X 10.5, thank you very much,) the hard drive died on me. This was rather unfortunate as I was hoping to use it in my preparations for finals week. I took it in to the Apple store down at the Gateway Mall in Salt Lake City, figuring that if any place would have a replacement hard drive for me, they would.
Unfortunately, while my laptop is still under warranty and the replacement could take place free of charge, the shop didn't have any hard drives of the correct variety in stock. So on Saturday night I traded my laptop for a piece of paper and came back home lamenting my loss. (Well, really, I drove four blocks to the Church Office Building parking lot in 45 minutes, got there too late to get our actual seats, watched the Mormon Tabernacle Choir concert with Dragon Lady from one of the side rooms used by the ushers, got free pink lemonade out of it, sat in the parking lot for 45 minutes before we moved on our way out, and THEN came back home lamenting my loss. But that's another story.)
In the meantime, I've been using a Windows desktop machine that I picked up early this year in exchange for some help to my cousins. When I got the computer, though, I only got the actual computer. No monitor, no keyboard, no mouse. I had an external monitor which I planned on using, but I still needed the keyboard and mouse. So I made the wise decision to purchase the cheapest keyboard/mouse combo I could find. I didn't realize just how low-quality the keyboard is until I was forced to use it exclusively; both Dragon Lady and Katya can testify that I was having extreme difficulties typing earlier today. (I'm typing this blog post using the cheap keyboard; I was actually hoping that it would start dropping letters so you could see what I'm talking about, but alas, it seems to be working better at the moment. I briefly considered retyping the entire blog post in hopes that it would start acting up, but my wiser half has informed me that this would be a terrible use of time with a 7:00 AM final pending tomorrow morning.)
The Apple technician told me that the hard drive would probably take 3 days to arrive. He told me this at about 6:30 PM on Saturday night, and I was left wondering exactly what three days meant. Saturday to Sunday, Monday, Tuesday? Was it too late to count Saturday, so we'd go Sunday to Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday? Did Sunday not count in such calculations, meaning that the order would go through on Monday and I'd receive it three days later on Thursday? As I had a presentation on Wednesday for which I strongly wanted my laptop, things weren't looking too good for me.
Happily, though, at 3:30 PM today I received a call informing me that my new hard drive had been installed and was ready to go. I called my dad who works up in Salt Lake and asked if he'd pick it up on his way home. He kindly obliged, and after an exchange in an Orem 7-11 parking lot earlier tonight, my laptop is back in my hands. (For those who I know will appreciate this, when I walked into my apartment with my newly received laptop, I immediately held it high above my head with both hands and proudly sang the "You Opened a Treasure Box!" theme from Zelda.)
Of course, the problem with having your hard drive replaced is that your data tends to depart with the old one. And this is the part where I bless Apple's name to my dying breath. With this latest version of OS X, (called Leopard,) Apple included an automated backup solution called Time Machine. When I plugged in my external hard drive, (thanks to Dragon Lady and her brother for picking it up for me,) I was asked if I'd like to use that drive for my backups. I said Yes, and after that point, the only thing I've had to do was make sure to connect my external hard drive when I've been at home. When I received my laptop back today, I simply booted from the OS X installation disk and selected "Restore System from Backup" from the drop-down menu. Leopard found the backup drive, listed the date and time of each of my backups, and is now copying all the files back to my computer.
You'll note that I said nothing about deciding which files to back up or deciding at what time the backup should run, or making sure that I was connected when that time came around, or being unable to use my computer during that backup time. That's because none of these applied to me in the least. (Okay, you can tell it not to back up certain directories, but the default is to back up all the non-volatile data on your hard drive, so it's not a concern.) I simply plugged it in, said "Yes", and now my data is all being restored exactly as I left it.
Bless you, Apple. And your little dog, too.
Most of my dreams either go unremembered or are so off-the-wall illogical that they don't bear remembering. Occasionally, though, I have one that seems to actually have some significance in my life.
My parents had been (in my dream) hosting a foreign exchange student from China. She was roughly my age, and apparently we got along pretty well. I don't really remember that part of the dream very well, but somehow, she and I decided to get married. This, of course, necessitated that her entire family fly over for the wedding. So we were waiting to get married,(in some non-temple-like gathering room with stadium seating,) but she was taking a long time to get dressed. A LONG time. Like, I was out there waiting for her for 45 minutes and she still wasn't ready.
So logically, my dad took my brothers and I to a nearby park to play while we waited for her to get dressed. And while we were out there, I suddenly realized that I really wasn't excited about marrying this girl. I mean, I knew that I liked her (in a cognizant sort of way... I didn't feel that I liked her, but I knew that I did,) but I didn't feel that I loved her. I've always been cautioned that marrying someone from a different culture is difficult; holiday traditions are different, expectations are different, and you generally just have to work a bit harder at things. And I wasn't sure that I was excited enough about this girl to put in that extra work. It probably didn't provide me any reassurance when I realized that I couldn't even remember her name.
At this point, I got a text message from her saying "Why are you not out there? Do you have special entering clothes as well?" (I assume referring to special clothing to be worn when entering the wedding chamber.) This just scared me even more... I wasn't ready for this! What about [insert real-life girl's name here]? Had I ever resolved my feelings about her? I couldn't remember! What about all the other girls in whom I'd been interested? What happened to all of them? Why did I choose to marry someone who I barely knew over one of them? Please let this all be a dream!
Since she'd text messaged me, we assumed that she was ready, and thus got in the car to head back. For some reason my dad was convinced that we needed to pick them up at the airport, so I had to remind him that no, they were all there waiting for us. He drove faster then, since the wedding chamber was even further away than the airport. My trepidation grew with every passing city block. I don't want to marry someone I didn't know! This is such a mistake! I wish this were a dream, but I'm afraid it's not!
Then I woke up. I can't tell you how relieved I was to find myself in my own bed, not getting married to the nameless Chinese exchange student.
Moral of the story: I have nothing against Chinese women, but please don't expect me to marry you when I can't even remember your name.
If you have a favorite book, a treasured pet, an essential device, or some other thing that's important to you, I implore you not to bring it near me for the next couple days. I seem to be breaking everything I touch.
No, seriously.
Today, my brother and I rode TRAX from Sandy up to Salt Lake in order to attend my father's company Christmas Party (to which family members were invited.) We took the 7:00 train northward and arrived just in time. However, the very next train to follow depart northward on that track became derailed. Yes, the very next one. As a result, our filled-way-beyond-capacity south-bound 10:20 train was forced to stop early and unload all it's passengers onto buses, which carried them past the derailed train and on to the next stop, where we re-boarded TRAX and continued our journey. There are dozens of UTA workers who would be cursing my name right now, if only they knew.
"But there were hundreds of riders on TRAX," you say. "How can you possibly take all the blame yourself?"
Very well, allow me to present further evidence. Upon arriving home in Provo, (at a much delayed hour due to the previously related incident,) I pulled out my 6-month-old laptop and was talking to a friend online. When all my windows suddenly stopped responding, I assumed that a simple restart would fix everything. When I rebooted, I discovered that my laptop no longer has a hard drive. Let me be clear. This is not just a partitioning issue, a mounting issue, or a corrupt file on the drive. The entire hard drive apparently no longer exists. I started up from my boot disk and found that the only drive in my computer is the very DVD drive I was using to boot the computer in the first place. This, of course, explained why my computer stopped responding in the first place.
So really. I don't know what's going on, but you may not want to let me drive your car anytime soon.
I've published previously about the Preposition Game and the License Plate Game. Well, I've got another game for you lexiphiles.
After my previous blog on Utah Drivers, I've been reminded that with Winter rapidly falling upon us, many people in Provo will be driving in snowy or icy conditions which they're not used to. In the interest of a preventing a few accidents, I've decided to publish Yellow's Winter Driving Manifesto:
I've heard a lot of people talking about "Utah Drivers" lately, and this doesn't seem to be the type of laudatory title one would wish upon one's own fellow Utahns. In an effort to determine if the title is deserved, I've been listening closely. I found some rather disturbing evidence that suggests that nobody actually knows what a good driver is. Allow me to present a few quotes:
