An Update!

It would be impossible to cover everything well in one post, so instead, I'll comment on various things that have happened recently:

1. Earlier this week, a few people decided to take over a building on campus to protest the education cuts. It must have been a big deal, with three helicopters flying over over the school, but only about 100 people showed up to their National Day of Action to Defend Education out of 30,000+ students.

2. It might not snow here, but it gets cold. Afternoons are around 60, and nights are 45 or so. In other words, it's not cold enough to wear a winter coat, but a little too cold to be comfortable wearing only a sweatshirt.

3. Skateboarding is a popular form of transportation around here. On the other hand, more than once I've seen somebody hurtling down Bancroft on a skateboard, only for their face to have a sudden and unfortunate meeting with the pavement.

4. Considering all the ultra-neurotic people at Boalt, which is supposed to be one of the most laid-back law schools, I wonder where they all came from, since I don't really ever remember meeting any neurotic people at Yale. In fact, the only other Yalie I know of is also pretty laid back.

5. I bought 26 oranges for about $5 a few weeks ago in Chinatown. Produce in Chinatown is so amazingly cheap. I don't know when I might finally eat the last orange.

6. I also bought four lemons for a dollar, except that I didn't know they were lemons. They're the biggest lemons I've ever seen, bigger than an orange. Now I have no idea what to do with them.

7. After months and months of delay, I finally bought a new computer. Then it got recalled. They cancelled my order, but didn't bother cancelling the warranty that came with the computer. Bastards.

8. Besides my computer ordering troubles, I've been having computer troubles with my current laptop. About two or three weeks ago, the computer suddenly started bluescreening constantly. At first, I thought maybe it was a problem with some corrupted OS files. But it wasn't that. I was afraid it was a hard drive failure, but then thought it was the CPU overheating. But it wasn't that, so I thought it was the motherboard failing, which would have been really bad. But it wasn't that, so I thought again that it was the hard drive failing. But the hard drive had no errors. I really had no idea what might be wrong. Finally I decided to test the RAM, and after taking out a stick of RAM, the computer has been running fine since then. Unfortunately, with only half the RAM as before, things are running much more slowly, but at least it isn't bluescreening. In my usual procrastinating manner, I've been putting off buying new RAM, mostly since I haven't completely confirmed that that stick of RAM is defective... even though my computer hasn't been bluescreening since. One day I will get some new RAM, I hope.

9. Gas is higher than ever. Unfortunately, I'm now driving more than ever. Gas is nearly $4 a gallon here, and most places either don't take credit card, or they charge higher prices for using a credit card. So I have to withdraw money from my account constantly. It was pretty rare to see a place on the East Coast do that, but it seems to be pretty common here on the West Coast, or at least in the Bay Area.

10. I still don't have a bed. Or rather, I still don't have a mattress. One day, that might change. One day.

11. I met someone from Cambodia today.

12. Did you know you can file your taxes by phone?

13. I would promise to update more often, but I shouldn't be making promises I can't keep. Under-promise and over-deliver.

Again

You remember when I said I would delay doing something until it got really bad, even though the solution might be really easy?

For the past three or four months, my printer has been acting screwy. Not the the printer itself, but the printing command on my computer. Whenever I tried printing something through, say, Firefox, the program would freeze for about a minute before showing the printing settings.

Of course, the solution was simple: reinstall the printer driver, which took about two minutes to download and two minutes to install. I kept rationalizing to myself, though, that it wasn't so bad, or that I'll download the file later. Then months pass by and I'm still dealing with the same problem that takes only five minutes to solve, and then finally I do something about it.

When will I ever learn?

Almost Went Back to the Dark Side

I don't like change. Once I do make a change, I stick with it. It took me over a year before I switched from Internet Explorer to Firefox, which I have used since. I've been using it for the past four years now and have had very few problems. Recently, however, I updated to Firefox 3.5 and started having big problems. Every so often, I would come upon a page that caused Firefox to use 50% of my CPU power. It became impossible to do anything in Firefox, and I would have to close that page. It had gotten so bad that I started using Internet Explorer(!) to visit those sites. I've had to do this for a few months now, but obviously, I couldn't keep on doing this forever.

Luckily for me, though, I finally fixed Firefox! I should have troubleshooted it sooner; it was easy to fix (but I know myself well enough that I knew I wouldn't do anything about it until it became unbearable). It turns out it had nothing to do with Firefox and everything to do with an add-on for ruby characters. All I had to do was change one setting, and magically everything went back to normal. In fact, even better than normal; whereas a few sites would perennially overexert Firefox, now nothing does.

In any case, if I hadn't been able to fix Firefox and had to give it up, it definitely wouldn't be to use Internet Explorer. Version 8 is a big improvement from previous incarnations, but it is still a terrible browser. It's incredibly bloated and loads extremely slowly. Even opening a new tab takes longer than it should. I probably would have downgraded back to Firefox 3.0. Or maybe I would have tried out Google Chrome.

Everyone asks me about Chrome. I used it occasionally at my tech support job at school. It's a nice, light browser. It runs slightly faster than Firefox too -- and yet I'm not using it. I've got a few reasons, none of which are probably very good, why I haven't downloaded and installed it. One is that Firefox comes with lots of useful add-ons (which I don't really use). Another is that I don't want Google to become the next Microsoft (even if in this case they do offer a superior product). To be honest, the real reason I haven't taken the leap is because I'm too lazy/resistant to change to do it. Maybe one day, though....