I was partly sick from Thanksgiving to maybe a week ago. Mostly it was a middling coughy and phlegmy sickness, not the normal sickness of runny nose/sore throat/inflamed inner ears that I have every year. But still very annoying and I couldn’t do much all those days I wasn’t feeling well. (Barely managed to play with my cousin’s dogs while she was on vacation.)

My brother’s cat kept biting me. (I’ve been trimming her claws lately so she can’t scratch, but she’s decided to use her teeth instead. Argh.) That resulted in a swollen right finger (almost an infection?) for which I had to care for a day and almost made me miss a trip to Disneyland! On my left hand she gouged my palm and left an inch-long cut which is just barely vanishing now. It’s really annoying trying to dress oneself when one’s hands are injured and bandaged, I’ll have you know.

Someone did something unexpected, not exactly pleasant. That’s all I’ll say.

Again felt lost and unsure of what to do with my life. Still no drive to get a job. ._.

My computer was running a bit sluggishly while using Adobe design programs. I’m used to that, never was able to run InDesign, Photoshop, and Illustrator all at once. But the fact that I couldn’t paint in Photoshop with both Firefox and Seamonkey open on Flash-heavy sites was such a pain. (I tried to ask for money for Christmas to buy more RAM for my computer, not sure how successful I would have been if two people hadn’t surprised me with lotso cash. :3 I think, though, that part of my problem was that I had left old SQL files on my desktop totalling over 5 MB. I realized that today when my aunt was explaining virtual memory to my mom, haha! Hopefully moving them off my desktop will speed things up. Then maybe I won’t have to spend so much on RAM!)

I lost my hairclip. This shouldn’t be so bad, but I really don’t know where I lost it and it bugs me. How can I be sure I won’t commit the same mistake again if I don’t know what I did wrong? Also it was a really good hairclip, it lasted me a good few years whereas before I went through hairclips every year. And it was pretty. Then another hairclip that I owned broke. $16 for a really pretty hairclip and the metal busted on one side so it’s kaput. Who said having a lot of hair is envious? I think it’s a bother.

For a few months now my laptop would have times where the Backspace key wouldn’t work. After a while the H key would go out too. Recently the G key joined the random moratorium. Even more recently, shutting down and starting fresh would not get the keys working again. I spent a couple days depressed thinking of my little baby that got me through college just being a useless lump of ancient computer parts. After a trip to Fry’s I had the brilliant idea to just buy an external keyboard. I don’t use my laptop much anyway. Just to listen to music and to use WordPress. But today! Today I started up my laptop and the keys worked!! I’m not holding my breath for this being permanent, but it gave me hope.

On said trip to Fry’s I was wondering why my month sucked so much, and I was beginning to blame it on aforementioned Someone, but I gave myself a hard shake and realized it was mostly my state of mind. Both bad and good things happened this month, I was just in a poor mood, likely because of cold temperatures and ill health, and I was focusing on the bad things. I managed to buck up and wrap Christmas presents and have a great Christmas with my wonderful family.

I wrapped my dad’s present, a JAG hat, in a huge box (“Did you remember to put anything in here?”) with tons of bows and ribbons on it. I noticed there was a serious Cinco de Mayo color scheme because I couldn’t choose among the red, green, and white on the wrapping paper, but no one else commented on it. :P

One brother’s present I wrapped in lots of newspaper ads, trying to make it look less like a DVD, the other’s I put in an empty Scotch tape refill box.

One cousin’s present I had to make a box for, so I used a Robitussin box (my sickness came in handy?) and the other I sandwiched money between two old Dragonball Z VHS cassettes.

Everyone had comments about how I wrapped their presents, so all in all I think it was a successful venture. XD

(I do this every year.)
$50 from Jichan
$50 from Auntie G and Uncle H (partly birthday present too, she said) (she also wrote their names exactly like that on the envelope, “from Uncle H and Auntie G,” I thought it was funny)
$20 from L
Little Nemo DVD
The Witch of Portobello by Paulo Coelho from N
Harry and David Moose Munch cocoa from Tracey
King’s Shield by Sherwood Smith from C (keeping up my Inda series for Christmas tradition; next year I’ll ask for the last book :P)
Stardust (movie) from Auntie and Uncle
Coraline soundtrack from Auntie J and Uncle G (or reverse with Auntie and Uncle… doesn’t really matter) (plus money for RAM)
Finding Nemo antenna ball from Disneyworld from Cousin 1
Finding Nemo novelty pen from Disneyworld from Cousin 2 (plus a handful of chocolates and a couple chocolate liquors)
antique pocketwatchface necklace from Mum and Daddy

I checked Dell’s support site (what a novel idea) for the Stop 7E error and someone mentioned running a Diagnostic test to find out if any parts of the computer were faulty.

Ran the test, got “Error code 0F00:2871 Optical drive BIST—FLASH ROM test failed.” Checked Dell’s support forums again, means I have to replace my CD/DVD drive (I don’t even know what it is…).

The odd thing is, the error only shows up for my DVD burner drive (drive F:), not for the primary CD/DVD drive (drive E:). Does the primary drive use the burner drive for something? Because I managed to reinstall Adobe CS2 just fine on my computer tonight.

Then again, I also noticed that CS2 is on (four) CD install discs, and CS4 is on (two) DVD install discs. Does that account for some odd discrepancy that I have no knowledge of?

CS2 also took only about 30 minutes to install and update, whereas CS4 took 45 minutes to crash and not even complete the install. mreh.

Worry … do I have to replace my primary disc drive, or the burner, or both? Don’t want to spend more money than I have to…

I bought Adobe CS4 Design Standard today. Almost 500 buckaroonies (got a student version). I was hesitant about spending that much money, but … Adobe shininess! And after I leave school, the price will soar higher than … mylar balloons, I don’t know, choose your own analogy.

So, yeah. I bought it, but left it sitting in my bookbag all day because I had to read three chapters of my book for a midterm tomorrow. Finally gave up on that around 6… took pictures of CS4, then left it sitting on my desk while I ate dinner and got over the apprehension of opening the box, thus losing any chance of getting almost $500 back.

Afterwards, here’s how it went (all times are approximate):
8:00 pm started installing
8:45 inserted second disk
8:46 computer shut down and got a STOP 0x0000007E, 0xC0000005, 0x806E694F, 0xF79ADC30, 0xF79AD92C error
8:47 restarted computer
8:48 PS CS4 was fine, ooh shiny, Illustrator CS4 had only 8 folders in program folder, InDesign CS4 folder was nonexistant
8:49 tried running Illustrator, got same crashing and error skit, haha Adobe
8:50 tried running second installation disk again, was asked which program to open disk with
8:51 tried running first disk, was told I completed installation
8:52 uninstalled most of CS4
9:30 started second install (sans Photoshop, Acrobat, some other things I thought installed all right)
9:57 inserted second disk again
9:58 computer shut down, etc.
9:59 restarted computer
10:00 uninstalled all of CS4
10:50 started writing this entry

So here I am wondering what to do. I suppose tomorrow (after my midterm, which I wanted to get to bed early for, d’oh!) I’ll uninstall CS2 and try CS4 again, maybe they share something that they can’t share? I don’t understand computers.

If that fails, I don’t know… call Adobe support like I did with my last problem installing Creative Suite? But will they be able to help me?

Me: Adobe, I love you so much, why can’t we sort out all the problems between us? Is it because I’m using a Dell? I swear, we’re breaking it off soon, real soon, but could you deal with us in the meantime?
Adobe: *turns away in chair, laughing even more*

Update@4pm: Uninstalled all Adobe software, CS4 still failed to install.

Concluding update to the whole CS4 debacle.

It’s a 20″ widescreen monitor, native 1680×1050, but the text is way too freakin’ small for me at that size. So I’ve got it down to 1440×900, a setting lower.

However, while text is at a good size for me, it is also slightly blurry. Not as bad as when I had it at 1280×768 though. (Because yes, I really am blind and do like my text big…)

The text isn’t as blurry as if I were using Microsoft’s Cleartype though, which I am very grateful for.

The only program this is bugging me in is Firefox/all other cool browsers that don’t have the initials I and E. All my Adobe design programs already antialias or blur the edges of my text, but then they aren’t rendered pixel by pixel, more along the lines of vectors…hahaha, horrible pun.

I could possibly make the screen smaller and pull the monitor closer to my face, but it’s at a comfortable distance at the moment. Maybe a couple inches too far, but not too bad. If I were to get too close, I’d get sick. I don’t know why. Whenever I sit too close to a monitor I get dizzy. Weak, yes!

Yet in computer labs in school I was always leaning as far back as I could possibly go, always sticking out in aisles and hyperextending my arm to reach the mouse and keyboard… Also had to take occasional breaks to rest my weary eyes and head.

I was considering keeping it at native resolution and just zooming in text for browsers, but I realized that the Windows interface text is all tiny and squishy and I probably can’t do anything about that other than using some LARGE PRINT theme that my Grandpa would have.

I guess I’ll just have to learn to live with slightly blurred text and slightly tired eyes at the end of the day.

I did like the program while I was using it. FEX just doesn’t fit into my current computer environment right now.

Pros: I guess programs opened up a microsecond faster than usual. I don’t have many fonts, just a few hundred, nowhere near the thousands that professional designers have.

It sure made looking for fonts in my system much easier. Even though it would slow down when I wanted to view font sizes in 300 pt (don’t ask). I could see the whole alphabet (upper case or lower case) in one go while scrolling through all of them. (Even though my typography teacher would be horrified to hear that sometimes that’s how I choose my typefaces.)

Cons: First and foremost, at the moment I hate having to open up an additional program to get access to typefaces. If I were working in a design environment, which I was last year, I absolutely would not mind. But now I open Adobe design programs only once in a while, and when I do I don’t like having to remember to open another program to use, say, PetitaMedium (something I use in my resume).

Secondly, I’m working on a Windows-based computer. There is currently no version of FEX outside of beta for Windows. That’s not too terrible, but for some reason something in FEX makes Windows snitty about opening system programs like Volume Control or Spider Solitaire or Calculator. In other words, very important programs! *snicker*

Last year I was okay with it and would just do all of that on my laptop, calculations, listen to music, or take a Spider Solitaire break. But right now I’m not settling in for long stretches to design things. I’m just opening a file here or there to edit while I’m on the computer. So I don’t turn my laptop on since I’m planning to not be here long or I plan to watch Youtube vidoes.

(Yes, my laptop, my retarded baby, is gradually becoming only a mobile entertainment center. Sad times, let me tell you. But wow, going from 384 MB RAM to 2 gigs … it’s a miracle!!)

A third reason that FEX is not so helpful is the fact that there are no tags in the program. I think I’ve become spoiled by Windows Media Player and online journals. I’m used to finding things through tags.

I know there are groups or sets or whatever in FEX, but I have to manually add fonts to each one. Every time I install a new font, I have to remember to categorize it, or else I’ll probably never remember to use it again. Since I haven’t gotten around to doing that yet (I did it on my laptop but I uninstalled FEX to make it run faster), I am forever scrolling through 400+ fonts trying to find all the serif typefaces and trying to figure out which one I’d like to use.

If I were working on a Mac, I would definitely pay for and install the newest version of FEX. (Mostly because I hate the Mac’s way of scrolling so slowly through the list of typefaces on Adobe programs.)

But since I am running Windows, I’ve decided that FEX has run its course on my computer and really must go. I’m saving the install file though just in case.

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I thought it was Firefox creating all the trouble but that proved false when I tried to wake up my laptop when no programs were open, yet it still ran very slowly. Now I figure it has to be the wireless netword card/PC card driver since there’s nothing else. If I want to put my laptop on standby, I’ll have to remove the card beforehand.

I would try fixing this little problem but I can’t remember how I fixed it before. I don’t even know how I got the computer to recognize the card or to access the internet after the reinstall. It was just a random crapshoot of installing different updated drivers and whatnot in different sequences from the Dell support site. Once I got it working I stopped touching it, and am now afraid that if I try to fix it I will just not have internet access period.

(I hate how old machines work only because each little clunky part is relying on the rest of the clunkyness and if you fix one little thing the whole thing goes kablooie!)

If you didn’t notice, I haven’t started on my photoblog yet. Partly because I am lazy. But mostly because my camera is back in Canon’s fix-it shop! (Yes, I sent it in once before.) I guess they fixed the faulty mode switch, but decided not to repair the image sensor. Or they did repair the image sensor, but they used a refurbished one so that my camera lost the horizontal lines (for the most part) but still had pink/purple tints to them. I don’t know.

So I called support and asked what was up with that, why it wasn’t fixed, but I don’t think I communicated well (what else is new). End result, I send it in because there is a recall out on it and they will fix it at absolutely no cost to me. (They even pay for shipping.)

Minor complaints: I saw the recall on the Canon support FAQ, but after reading it I didn’t think it included my camera. It’s probably my lack of communication/comprehension skills. But I mentioned the problem in the repair form. I don’t know why it wasn’t fixed adequately. I wouldn’t have minded (too much) paying to fix the problem the first time I sent it in. Having to send it in again and being without my camera for the first couple weeks of school is a real pain in the [insert body part].

All in all though, it’s cheaper than buying a new camera. And I like my camera. I would miss it if I had to recycle it.

(I was originally going to buy a new camera because I didn’t feel like dealing with repairs and sort of wanted a camera right at the moment, but Mum ranted about appliances not working as long as they used to and what’s wrong with electronics today? so I sent it in to prove to her that Canon doesn’t really suck that much. :3 Who’s right?)

Finished upgrading Win XP and drivers and such on my laptop, then re-installed all the programs and copied back most of my files. Interesting note: most of the programs I installed, I downloaded free online. Only three were on CD (Paint Shop Pro 6, yes, Photoshop 7, and my Canon camera things).

For a day or two after the fresh install I had a really hard time connecting to the internet. I could access the computer network, but not the internet. X( I’ve had problems with my laptop network card (external, yes my laptop is that old) and XP SP2 before. I downloaded a new driver that time, but I don’t know how I fixed it this time. Apparently some weird mix of installing and uninstalling some drivers I downloaded from Dell made things click. *blink*

Now my speed never reads as fast as 54 mbps, it’s about half that speed or less, but then again I never really trusted the high number before. Just because the card can go that fast doesn’t mean it is.

The only other problem I have is, for some reason my laptop doesn’t like to come back from standby. Whenever I try to wake it up, everything runs slower than molasses if it were a hundred years old. At first I thought it was my wireless card driver or something, because that’s happened before, with that whole SP2 fiasco, but my laptop runs fine from startup.

Then I thought it was Photoshop, because it’s been running slow recently (can’t remember what settings I had it at before), but a third time proved that theory false. Now I’m wondering if it’s Firefox that’s the cause, but I’m too scared to try it out, and I can’t remember if I had Firefox open the very first time…

End result? I’ve got 4.92 gigs of free space on my harddrive, less than before, but I’ve also got most all my music on this laptop now. XD That folder went from about 3.5 gigs to a bit over 12 gigs. I also sacrificed my pet pictures—they’re currently only on my external harddrive (must remember to copy them to my desktop…*worry*)—I don’t normally do anything with them anyway. That saved me three gigs.

(Oh, of course, my startup time is about the same as it was before, perhaps a mite faster, but not really noticeable. Firefox (still on 2) also has gone back to opening fairly slowly, but what can ya do?)

All in all, I am one happy puppy. Or should I say kitty? We don’t have a dog at the moment. :(

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Firefox (2 still, don’t quite like 3) starts up really fast too! :D Still have to import my bookmarks, and work on my preferences (allow or deny cookies for sites as I go around).

I’ve gone from 5.5 gigs hard drive space free to 25 gigs free! Tomorrow I’ll have to move all my files back on here. Hoping I have enough space to upload most of my music. *crosses fingers*

I finished reorganizing my closet today too. (Well, finished installing new shelving and finalized where I put everything.) What a productive day! It just zipped by! Like my laptop! Ohoho!

It probably didn’t help that I had a … My Documents folder Window open (… I have no idea what they’re called, sadly) with a folder of almost 400 images in the Thumbnails view setting (woo, look at that CPU speed shoot through the roof!) that I was attempting to close.

(It was my Amy Lee 2 folder. Yes I have enough images in one folder to warrant the creation of a second folder. Why am I talking about this? I have no idea. One would think that I’d find it horribly embarrassing to post on the internet that I have almost 1500 images of Amy Lee on my computer. — And I’m just saving pictures to analyze her style, sheesh!)

I think I really do need help … for my laptop, I mean.

This did remind me of another complaint I have though: it takes forever to go from My Computer to either the Windows folder or Program Files folder. Also the My Music folder (moved it to C:\ when my laptop was running at a fraction of a snail’s speed after installing SP 2), but not as slowly, so it’s not that bad. Sometimes it also takes a few seconds to load the C:\ drive itself, and the little flashlight beams around searching for it. (Helloooo, Windows, where aaare you? Olly olly oxen freee!)

A little bit of info: I own a Dell Inspiron 2650 laptop, bought in the summer of 2002. Currently runs on 384 MB RAM (somehow the video card takes up 128 MB of the installed 512? I don’t understand it, but meh), was at 256 ’til about a year or so ago. (No I am not kidding.) My hard drive is 27.9 gigs (my mp3 player is bigger! at roughly 28,000 MB).

Normally when I’m working on my sites I like to have the following programs open: Windows Media Player (or Winamp, depends on which playlist I’m listening to); Volume Control (crazy songs all having different volume levels); Mozilla Firefox; FileZilla; Notepad; Windows Explorer (er, you know, the “My Documents” et cetera folder windows…); Adobe Photoshop 7 (hah, I realized this year that it’s outdated by three whole versions now); Linotype FontExplorer X (when are they gonna release a non-beta Windows version? :( ); Calculator (to figure out em sizes); and sometimes, Spider Solitaire, to entertain myself while my computer’s trying to process something.

It never really bothered my laptop before, running all those programs. (Well okay, maybe FontExplorer is a drain, but I don’t have it open that often.) But it seems like the past couple of months, I’ve complained more about my laptop’s speed.

And two things I noticed this weekend: (one) when I click on a program in the Start menu, the menu doesn’t disappear after a second anymore, it just sticks around until the program opens up … a few seconds later (this includes Spider Solitaire and Calculator); (two) Firefox’s Bookmarks responds way slower than they used to. Sometimes I can’t even get the Bookmarks menu to open when I click it. D:

So yeah, Windows Explorer crashed tonight. All I tried to do was highlight another file, to see the dimensions of the image and then everything … stopped … responding.

I’ve been planning for a number of months to reinstall XP on this laptop this summer, to try and improve performance. A lot of computer help sites (er, members of support forums, rather) suggest doing a fresh install regularly once a year. *boggles* So I thought, hey, once in 6 years, my performance should definitely improve, right?

Well at the moment I’m feeling it won’t have much of an effect. :( I think all the programs I have on here and use regularly, they’ve just got too many add-ons, updates, doohickeys, and whatnot compared to six or even two years ago.

Plus, my laptop has picked up this annoying whine that appears every so often. It might be tied to the fan running. Or it might be the the hard drive whirring. Whatever it’s doing, it bugs the heck out of me. I don’t like extraneous noise, or repetitive noise, of which the sound is both.

Then I was reading the Wikipedia articles on Linux, Debian, and Ubuntu (unrelated to my computer woes; [wow, the whine started up not more than half a minute after it stopped O_o *cough* back to my previous thought] XKCD had a comic about a Debian flaw and I was trying to figure out what the heck it was talking about *snrk*), and found out that for Ubuntu, the minimum required RAM is 384 MB. For Windows XP 128 MB is recommended, which I have thrice over. So I guess Ubuntu is out on this laptop. (Although when I get a new laptop, I’ll probably still install it on this laptop just as a trial run.)

I don’t know what to do! I don’t have money for a new laptop! Besides, it seems like all laptops suck nowadays. N’s Dell laptop keeps not reading the BiOS (it’s so funny! every time he starts up his computer, it says there’s no BiOS! HAHAH— okay I’m being sarcastic). C’s Dell laptop battery lasts only a couple minutes. (I guess that’s not really the laptop itself … but my battery still lasts almost two hours, despite being two years old, or however old it is.)

There’s a MacBook, but that thing costs mucho bucks! Money that I do not have, and am not willing to borrow from any relative! (Cough, Bank of N.)

And … well, I guess there are smaller, less popular brands out there that are good, but I don’t really feel like researching. I want my six-year-old laptop to work! :( It’s so nicely designed and simple and all one color and not ugly.

In other news, inangeling.net has a new layout! After how many years? It would have been two years this July. Wow! That’s the longest I’ve ever had a layout up. I don’t know if I’m happy with the layout. The guinea pigs just don’t look right to me (this means I need to own a guinea pig in order to draw them right! woot! going to the shelter tomorrow! *snrk*)

I (sorta, somewhat) used wolftlou’s Musician’s Element colo[u]r palette (adding my own pink to the pig, and muting the blue for the background).

I think a major problem I have is with the alignment of the Sites list and Et Cetera list. Soou much empty space around them, ugh!

I might end up going back to the prevous layout, rearranging the text so it’s a vertical layout and not a horizontal one, or at least making the divs larger so it’s not hard to read. But in the meantime, new layout, yay go check it out, see how I morph guinea pigs into weird positions for my own amusement.