Some of my life has been recovered

I once again tried to boot the old PowerBook in target mode, but it didn't see the external USB keyboard that I hooked up in the hopes of it recognizing that I was pressing down on the 't' key (which is the way it knows to boot in target mode apparently). Rather, it actually booted up!! I put in my username and password, and all of a sudden I was staring at all my desktop files and my wallpaper. I jumped up and down in front of my labmate Jonathan. He looked at me like I was funny. My joy was slightly premature, as the computer froze about a minute later. I turned it off, and since the laptop keyboard was working, I decided to try and boot it in target mode again so I could do the full hard drive transfer, but it went back into death mode. We found some instructions online and pulled out the hard drive, attached it to some thing that I don't know the name of that allowed it to be plugged into the USB port. My new computer saw the hard drive! I decided the first thing to copy over would be my home directory, as my files are the most important. Applications...well they can be replaced. What I should have done (already with the should haves) is first moved just my 'Pictures' directory, and then my 'Research' directory, and then my 'Music' directory. All in all, my home directory had about 20 GB worth of data, about 10 GB of which is music. It got about 12 GB into the copy when the hard drive kind of petered out. I'm letting it rest overnight and really hoping I'll be able to get the rest (I really don't want to assume it's completely dead...yet). Because most of that 12 GB is the music, and damn if I didn't realize that I'd rather have my pictures than the music, since I can replace most of the music. Probably all of it with a little work. So I'm still kind of at square one, in terms of the research stuff I had on the computer, and my pictures. Thank god for Flickr. If I didn't have at least most of my favorite pictures uploaded there...I would be really depressed.

I did get all of the files on my desktop, and I got my 'Documents' folder which had some stuff, but nothing extremely important. Of course I managed to save my favorite lolcats pictures:


Now I can sleep easily. Sheesh.

Tomorrow night (as it's nearing midnight and I really should be getting up before 7 a.m.) I'll be backing up all the music, and whatever files I have. I swear. Now it's a matter of getting the programs back, most of which I think I can get from my adviser (i.e. Matlab). I downloaded Firefox tonight. I missed Firefox; Safari is pretty lame. All the Blogger functions work better in Firefox.

Interestingly, I did a Google search for 'flickr + facetioushorse' (which is my username, and the reason why I was searching for my Flickr site that way is because I have o.c.d. about mis-typing addresses into the address bar), and the last link on the page is actually an image search on search.com for 'bob + hair + cut'. Apparently, their image searches also go through Flickr, and there I am, the first result from their Flickr search. I feel kind of famous.

Listening: Grey Daturas - Path of Niners (oh how I missed you, Grey Daturas!)

There are some upsides to breaking a computer, right?

There seems to be at least one good thing about the "PowerBook + water = dead computer" equation, and it is that I have to build my iTunes library from scratch. I'm not uploading things that I already had, in the hope that when I take the old hard drive out, I'll be able to transfer everything over. A lot of the stuff I had on there was sent to me by Joe, or uploaded from Corey's extensive library. (Corey is my now ex-boyfriend that I lived with for two years.) Corey has graciously offered his CD library to me, after I told him the story. I would say I had about fifty of my own albums on there. So what I've uploaded so far is mostly older stuff, which translates into a lot of my hardcore, post-punk, and basically heavier stuff. Some of it is also just indie stuff I haven't listened to in a long time, due to simple neglect. It's like travelling back in time! It's like getting my money's worth all over again!

Other than that, I can't think of any really good upsides to wrecking a perfectly good computer, but that's probably because I'm just not trying hard enough.

After going through last week, which was definitely worse than most in the recent past, it feels great to get back to my normal self. I realized only today that I was getting really uptight and neurotic last week, which I guess is my fallback personality when things aren't going well. I don't handle the stress of the unknown with grace. I sure wish I could learn how to do that. This weekend definitely helped me get my mind off of the computer problems, and helped me to not think about the fact that I made zero progress on my new paper. Friday was relaxing in that I spent the evening doing laundry and watching Sex and the City (contain your jealousy of my exciting nights)...and sort of mentally decompressing. Saturday morning I had a slight lapse into yelling in anger as I spent 30+ minutes on hold on a customer service line only to get cut off somehow. However, I recovered quickly and made my way over to violin, where we learned Canon in D. Only one more week of Level 1 violin. I'm so glad they've decided to add a Level 2 and Level 3. It ends up being $10 per one and a half hour class, which is so much more than reasonable. I couldn't afford private lessons.

One of B's friend threw a party on Saturday afternoon in honor of landing a job after many months of searching. On a personal sidenote, I think I would go absolutely insane if I couldn't find a job for months. I think it's some strange part of my personality. I am only starting to understand how out of control I feel if things aren't meeting a pretty high threshold of where I think they should be. I am not someone you would describe by saying "she goes with the flow". No, I try to control the flow. We had a lot of fun, and I met some more new people who were all very down to earth and interesting and funny.

Today was one of those days that put things in perspective for me, it was so great. I'm finally beginning to appreciate the art of sleeping in past 8 a.m. (really, not joking). B had planned ahead so we could make french toast when we got up, and it ended up turning out fantastic! We had taped Sarah Silverman's movie "Jesus is Magic" when it was on last weekend (Comedy Central showed it late at night, uncut and uncensored), and watched it today. Then I came home and made a to-do list and crossed everything off. So, it was the best of both the world of relaxation and the neurotic world of getting-things-done-on-a-Sunday. I think B is really good for me.

The only thing I'd like to do in the near future is make a trip to Amoeba. It's getting to the point where I'm beginning to feel cut off from the world, I don't know what is new, or what is great right now. I need that feeling of being on the cusp of what is current in music.

Listening: Oma Yang - From the Heart of Jumbo Malaria

well, that sucked

Holy hell. This post was supposed to be written on Friday night. In fact, I was just settling in for a long night of uploading pictures to Flickr and writing a blog post when I lost control of my motor skills and, instead of just picking up the glass of water next to the PowerBook, I dumped the glass of water onto the keyboard of the PowerBook. I don't mean a few drops either. I was afraid I was going to be electrocuted if I touched the thing. Luckily I regained my senses and turned it upside down to let the water run out (that's right, run out) and popped the battery out, but not before the pretty pictures started appearing on the screen. So to recap, I took a cup of water and basically poured it in to a fully functioning, powered ON, PowerBook. It is basically dead, and my only hope is that the hard drive didn't get fried.

The computer wasn't mine, it was a sort of backup lab computer that my advisor let me use starting about a year ago. Since my own personal computer is a Windows 98, 6 GB monster of a machine (as I'm sure you can imagine), the Mac became my de facto personal computer as well (my advisor was aware of, and condoned, this). So although I didn't have a stroke right then and there, I have spent no small amount of time worrying about all those great digital pictures that I've taken since February, and all those albums that I got from other people, and the latest draft of the paper I'm currently working on.

"Didn't you back up?", you might be thinking.

Funny that you ask. Several months ago I bought an 80 GB external hard drive for this very purpose, knowing that this wasn't a computer I would be taking with me after graduation. However, I have since then made excuse after excuse, putting it off until a later day when I had more time. Well, that day never came. So ironic. And a sad, makes me want to cry ironic. Maybe in a few months this will be the hey, laugh at me kind of ironic.

The upside (beware the staggering rationalizations ahead) is that I realized I basically have no computer, and need one anyway for when I begin my professional (or academic) life sometime in the near future, so it makes perfect sense to invest in one now. And really, investment makes it sound so much better. I could either waste $500 on a Windows box (I use Linux at work, and have found that the Mac is completely compatible for work related projects) that would be used primarily for internet, or I could invest more money into a MacBook Pro that would not only be portable, but would serve as my first real computer that I could use for research purposes (I do computational work). So, I bought the MacBook Pro yesterday! I was a little stressed out, realizing it's going to take me a while to pay off this investment, but feel very comfortable with my decision today. It's a bit sooner than I would have liked, but I am the one who spilled the water in the PowerBook. Every action has a reaction, so I hear.

I tried to use the Migration Assistant (import old Mac hard drive onto new Mac hard drive), which boots the old Mac in Target Mode, but the old Mac was having none of it. I'm trying not to worry too much. It looks like we're going to have to remove the hard drive and physically turn it into an external hard drive so I can try and get all my data (and the programs, oh the programs!) off the old Mac.

Man, I am already tired of this post, but I had to tell that story to explain the five day absence. I should also say, that I can't post pictures from Joe's birthday bash or the NEMS BBQ right now. Those are all still on my memory card though, so if worse comes to worse, I can upload them again.

But in the last post, I promised to talk about several things: my new niece, car troubles, fancy dinners, and violin updates - wow!

My new niece: somewhat self explanatory, but there are details. She was born on June 28 early in the morning, and her name is Evellyn June. She's kind of cute, but the novelty of the newborn definitely only works once. Iain (her big brother) is now 15 months old and has is own personality now, and is starting to talk. He is so much fun to play with. I sound like a horrible aunt, but I'm just being honest.

Car troubles: also kind of self explanatory. Nothing too major (in terms of money cost), but a lot of mental hassle. I was driving home last Sunday afternoon to visit my family and see the new baby, and home is about a two hour drive east of here, when I had a tire blow out on me on the freeway. Now this wasn't the kind of thing that causes spinouts and wrecks; the tread just suddenly separated from the inner tube, so it wasn't completely flat. Scary nonetheless! I was able to safely get off the freeway and into a nearby parking lot. I had to call AAA since I don't have a jack and still had to drive about 50 miles to get to either place - back to L.A. or out to my parents' house. In the process of taking off the lug nuts, the guy breaks one of the studs. Thanks man! My brother says plenty of people drive with just three studs, but I don't know...So they guy puts on my spare for me and directs me to a tire store just a few blocks up the road. I decide that is probably the best idea and head up there. I get there and they don't have replacement studs, and somehow manage to break a second stud while taking off my spare. I definitely cannot drive anywhere with only two studs! These people ended up being nice and got the job done well, but it was a bit sketchy for a while. One of them was sent on an errand to Auto Zone to get two new studs and all new lug nuts. In the process of disassembling my disk area, the guy tells me my brake caliper is leaking brake fluid. I'm really glad he told me.

I got to my parents' house safely and the next day I asked my Dad to take off the spare to make sure everything looked okay, and to check if the brake caliper was leaking. Of course, it was. Also saw that my CV boot was broken, and we decided to get a whole new axle rather than taking the time with a boot repair kit. Funny story: about a year or two ago, the BRAKE sensor on my dashboard lit up, I asked my Dad bout it, and he thought it was just that the emergency brake sensor was broken and didn't register when I took the emergency brake off. Sounds good to me. After we fixed the brake caliper (and it turned out I had no brake fluid in the reservoir), the light went off. So I was being warned this whole time. Awesome. I'm so glad this was noticed before the inevitable accident that would have occured one day while driving around town when I just...couldn't...stop the car.

Fancy dinners: this one is a good story. B's friends Liz and Matt hosted a group of people at the Athenaeum (the Caltech hotel) for dinner. The occasion was to celebrate Matt's birthday. The traffic sucked, and I again affirmed the fact that I could never commute more than three to five miles in this city on a daily basis without significantly increasing my blood pressure, getting migraines, and becoming a horrible person in general. The dessert table was fantastic, I had various treats run under the chocolate fountain, and some kind of chocolate cheesecake thing.

Violin update: This Saturday we learned several harmony parts to our week 1 and 2 material - Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star and Ode to Joy. We also learned "low 2's", which I'm not going to explain. The week before that we learned a really beautiful little piece called New World Symphony. Only two more weeks left, and this Saturday was are learning Canon in D (except for the really hard part that makes you recognize the song - our instructor will be playing that part). There was some discussion of having some kind of recital at the end for family and friends. The thought makes me nervous. I practice, but it will take a long time for me to sound like I can actually play.

Time for bed. Now I can purge all of this information from my head, since it's been written down.

So to recap: Always, always leave glasses of water on the floor or some other lower elevation perch relative to an open, powered up laptop, check your brake fluid reservoir level if the BRAKE light is on in the dashboard panel, and for God's sake, BACK YOUR FUCKING DATA UP (that last one is for me).

Listening: Isis - Oceanic

The summers are no longer relaxing

Only the second post of July so far! Bummer. A lot has been going on, and it is always more interesting to think about things and comment on them as they are happening since the little details are still there, but I've been too busy to sit down and write for a while. I have to go all the way back to July 7th to get up to date.

B was in San Francisco visiting some friends that weekend, and my friend Joe, who incidentally has a music blog called Listening Man, celebrated his 28th birthday by throwing a party at this house in Studio City (I prefer to say 'in the Hollywood Hills', since I arrived there by way of Mulholland Drive, but hey). I usually feel pretty ambivalent about parties, but I ended up having a lot of fun at this party despite going alone. I even took a lot of pictures. (Blogger is not letting me upload pictures at the moment...these will go in the next post. Pretend they are here.)

The second week at Caltech was much more fun socially, but academically frustrating for me, as the subject matter covered was almost pure physics: classical and quantum mechanics as applied to NEMS devices. It took me a while to get what a lot of the speakers were talking about. What I mean by that is so many of them started off running as if they were giving an actual lecture as opposed to talking to a more general scientific community, or graduate students that are not experts in the subject. Towards the end of the week, all of the participating students threw a BBQ in one of the courtyard of one of the undergrad dorms (Dabney). The undergrads gave us some looks, but didn't say anything. After the food was eaten, and people had drank more of the whiskey and vodka, some people jumped in the jacuzzi (yes, in the courtyard of the dorms), and some people jumped in the ballpit (like you find at McDonald's, and again, yes, in the lounge of the dorms), trying to make up rules as they went along for possible ballpit tournaments. For the second time in a week, I took a lot of pictures. I was glad I did. Those aren't ready to be posted yet though.

On my last night in Pasadena, B drove up for what was supposed to be a free catered dinner, with open bar, but apparently the order was never confirmed and there was no free dinner. So B and I decided to go to this great Mexican place called El Portal. Pasadena was really hot during the daytime, but I have to say the evenings were so, so pleasant. Maybe I'm just jealous because, although it is cooler here on the westside where I live, my apartment is so hot in the late afternoon and I get so little circulation that I have to turn the A.C. on to be mildly comfortable.

I think this about the halfway point of the post, but I'm feeling rundown from the long day (and not enough sleep last night), so maybe I'll postpone the rest until tomorrow night. I don't suppose too much will happen between now and then. Just some highlights of what is to come: my new niece, car troubles, fancy dinners, and violin updates - wow!

Listening: Modest Mouse - Building Nothing Out of Something

The rest of last week (before the first) just flew by in a flash. The only highlights worth mentioning are the fact that the day after I posted my rant, someone just tore through the bathroom and left it a mess. That's right, two days in a row, lucky me. I took some pictures of it on my camera phone, but since I haven't gotten around to e-mailing them to myself yet, I doubt it's going to happen in the future. Suffice it to say it was actually slightly worse than what I described. It included an unwrapped maxi pad lying on the floor. Seriously.

Last Thursday, B and I went to the Echo to see Xu Xu Fang, as it was their record release party. They are my current favorite L.A. band, as they have that guitar driven, dark and swirly, yet catchy sound that I'm into. Female vocals float across the top, rather than standing out. Although, I have to say that since a recent lineup change in which they lost two guitar players (the previous lineup had three!) and gained a new second guitarist, their wall of guitar sound that I was digging has definitely weakened.

Saturday afternoon I was back in violin class after practicing Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star every day, probably causing my old man neighbor to hate me. That's alright, he's always been a dick, banging on the wall when I talk in my room past 10 p.m. Yes, not a typo, I can't talk in my room after 10 p.m. without him banging loudly on the wall. We learned a much more challenging song: Ode to Joy by Beethoven. We slaughtered it very nicely. Unfortunately, I didn't have as much time this week to practice as I've been up at Caltech since Monday afternoon for a two week NSF summer school on nanomechanics. I suppose I could have brought the violin, but seeing as the walls in the dorms we are staying in are paper thin, I'm glad I didn't. If I were really good, I could justify it by saying my practicing would be like entertainment for those around me...but that's just a lie.

I'm going to go off on a bit of a tangent here, but I spent most of Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday in a strange mood due to my change in scenery. It had nothing to do with the course itself, which has been very interesting, and I've been learning a lot. It has more to do with the fact that when I was in high school, I really, really wanted to go to Caltech (or MIT) but didn't get in. I thought I was going to get in, which is what made it so disappointing. If there was anyone from my school that could get in, it was me, and I had yet to "fail" in life at that point, so I was just convinced they would want me. Well fast forward eight years, me seemingly over such a small detail (large though it may be to a seventeen year old). But something about living in the undergraduate dorms and actually pseudo-experiencing life at Caltech, I not only felt like I had regressed about six years in life to a time when life existed completely inside a ten foot by ten foot room and the surrounding campus, but I felt a sense of inadequacy and regret that that didn't get to become my life. Strange.

I should say that in general, I am happy with the direction my life took. The truth is, I wouldn't have been exposed to many of the things that have made me who I am if I had gone to a place like Caltech. I have to remind myself of that, because I do really like who I am as this adult.

Also adding to my feelings is the fact that B went to Caltech for his undergrad, and before now, I had always thought of it as the sort-of-distant past, the same way Miami is to me at this point. But being in the dorms where he lived and experienced so much is strange and makes me feel like there is so much I'll never be able to fully understand about him that occured at an important part of his life. This is really dumb though, as the inverse is also true, and he'll never get to know the Melissa that was kind of boy crazy and a dumbass at 19, and 20, and truthfully a little bit at 21 too. But I know that doesn't matter, that everything that happened in Miami is just the past. Who I am now is what matters in our relationship. Again, just some strange feelings.

I have the weekend off, and sleeping in my own bed will be nice. Seeing my cat is comforting as well; I worried about her all week, needlessly. Week three of violin tomorrow, I hope the amount of practice I did on Monday and today will get me through without too much embarrassment. I'll be going back to Caltech on Sunday night, so practicing this week will be scarce again. Oh well. Grad school has to come first.

Listening: Mum - Finally We Are No One