The first time I ever had chocolate lucky charms, I was in the great state of Tennessee. I saw a commercial for them, and my parents went out to get some food (we visited my Brother around Christmas). They asked me if I would like anything, and I thought “eh, what the hell” and asked if I could get some Chocolate Lucky Charms.

It’s not as if plain, non-chocolate Lucky Charms aren’t bad enough. The chocolate makes it overkill, as well as consecutively pisses off Count Chocula, Sonny the Coocoo bird, The Cookie Crisp Wolf (who used to be a dog), Snap, Crackle, Pop, and countless Mascots for lesser known generic cereals. Why? Because Lucky has snapped away the crown for the “Worst Cereal For You, Ever” title. What’s the point of making a cereal essentially a bowl of chocolate chip cookies knowing that you’re just going to be trumped by chocolate cereal with dense clumps of sugar resembling pots of gold and rainbows? I don’t even know how they manage to stomach their own false-integrity of passing it off as part of a balanced breakfast. It’s only balanced if you’re right on track to be the first six-year-old with diabetes.

But heaven help me, I’m addicted. I’ve got 4 bowls in my sink right now, waiting for me to wash them. When I do, I’m going to look at the purply-brown colored rings and spots in the bowls, painfully remembering that for the past semester, I can check off that most of my intake was in the form of tiny chocolate puffs and marshmallows.

Nobody was edging me on. There was no cereal-peer-pressure. I have nobody to blame but myself. I didn’t have a lifetime of media telling me that Lucky Charms is what all the cool kids did to relax, no. I had a Leprechaun get me hooked on the end of the rainbow and he just pushed me from there.

I am a broken man.
Damn you, Lucky. Damn you.

Just realized that Christmas is in like a week. This is scary.

I’m in IST 230 right now, and I still have a week of classes. I think this accounts to my lack of shopping. Classes end on the 22nd, wayyyyyyy to late for any real productive holiday planning.

In other news, my friend Adam just told me that he’s buying shoes for everyone. I said “Shoes don’t make a good Christmas gift!”, to which he replied “Only if you’re an Aborigine!”. I told him that I was indeed an Aborigine, so I’m getting the other gift that Adam gives out for the holidays — A digeridoo.

There you have it — my holiday shopping conundrum is solved. If you don’t get shoes this year, I hope you know how to play the Digeridoo.

Okay, I did a little housecleaning. Really quickly, there’s a few new features on the site that you may or may not have noticed:

• Ajax Searching: Just type in a query and wait a few seconds. Your results will come without the page reloading.
• New Colors: Pretty?
• My FlickrStream: Same site, new additions, bigger thumbnails, etc. Don’t worry — I’m just waiting to get a camera and then that site is going to consume a great deal of my life.
• Slider thingy: See it, up there at the top of the page? Use it to navigate back in the archives without actually having to go through the mess that is the archives.

So where have I been
It wasn’t a fluke. I didn’t redesign my blog the first time and expect to stop posting two days afterwards. Here’s the sitch: My computer is the technological equivalent of an episode of NBC’s House. Now, I don’t know if you’re familiar with the show, but the basic episode goes like this:

• 1. Some patient comes in the hospital with a weird set of symptoms
• 2. Dr. Gregory House and his colleagues argue about what could be wrong with the patient. House, being the #1 guy, acts like a jerk.
• 3. They run tests on the patient, and try some medical procedure to find out if they can pinpoint the problem. Lots of shotgun-style medical speech and terminology is used here.
• 4. House’s colleagues are all fools, and they botch the treatment, because they misdiagnosed it to begin with
• 5. Sometimes, more complications arise
• They repeat steps 2-5 a few more times
• If the episode’s patient is a little kid, someone’s mother, or a beloved T-Ball coach, they find out what the problem is at the last possible moment and treat it correctly. If not, the patient dies, or is informed that they will die, and House, completely jaded, goes back to his apartment to the melancholy tune of a John Mayer song, where he proceeds then to abuse prescription painkillers

This has been the past 3 months for me. Whatever it is that’s wrong with my computer is elusive. It’s as hard to find as Paris Hilton’s dignity. If you’re not into technical jargon, I suggest you skip down to the next part, or maybe read the summary below this paragraph.

Shortly after my post on September 5th, my computer suddenly tells me that many of my system files have been corrupted. I spend days recovering what I can from my hard drive using a Linux LiveCD. I attempt to reinstall Windows (after multiple failed attempts to load a special driver into the XP install, drivers that are needed to recognize my harddrive that I can’t install any other time because my floppy port is inactive from an electrical fire), only to discover that the same thing happens about a week later. Once again, I try to format and reinstall windows. This time, it works, and upon unpacking my data, it turns out that some minor files as well as nearly a third of my entire music collection has been corrupted. I spend time redownloading the music (from our tuition-provided Napster service) and trying to reinstall all of my old software. One problem — many high-demand programs won’t run because of an issue I later diagnosed as a broken memory controller. I can only use about 400mb of my memory before XP flips out and dies in front of me. I thought that was just a problem I should deal with, and continued. Then, I discover that the reason that half of my software wont install is because my CD/DVD drive has a bad CD-reader. It can properly read only DVDs. This is bad. But it gets worse: Now, my entire IDE channel refuses to be recognized. This includes all optical drives put in it’s channels. If I didn’t have a Serial-ATA harddrive, I wouldn’t have a computer right now.

SO, to recap, here’s a list of everything that’s broke right now (to my knowledge, anyway)

• Motherboard’s floppy-drive connector is dead (both the drive and the port caught on fire a few years back due to an ungrounded internal power connection)
• USB Ports are on the fritz. Sometimes my mouse moves on its own, sometimes when I click once it registers 2, 3, 6 clicks.
• Optical drive is buggy (only reads DVDs)
• IDE controller is broken — so even if I had a working optical, I couldn’t use it
• Memory Controller goes bad after 400mb of usage
• Windows XP is haunted and hasn’t worked properly since last summer

So yeah, I’ve been testing, researching, and attempting to debug, for about three months. I’m starting to lose hope in my computer.

There was other stuff though! Here’s a quick recap of the past three months, I won’t go into much detail.

• I built a working ipod out of two broken ones, now mine doesn’t look all melted anymore!
• I helped out a lot with a greatly successful IST Professional Expo
• I saw Borat: Cultural Learnings of America Make Benefit Great Nation of Kazakhstan. Twice now. If you haven’t seen it, go now.
• I put my first 1,000 miles on my car
• Helped to put on a bunch of SOMA shows around PSU, all of which went fantastically
• Built a website for my research group to get a projection of the election
• I did, in fact, drive around with friends, forcing them to listen to Horse the Band’s Pizza

Just stuff like that. There’s a lot you can do in three months, those are just some of the highlights. I’m not going to rant.

Thanks for reading, everybody. I do actually plan on posting regularly, Now that I’ve given up all hope for my computer ever functioning normally again. Come back soon, and keep your eyes open for new stuff!

Mwah,
Tim

Changes, oh, sweet changes.

I’ll be fooling around with the CSS and updating a few more features here and there over the course of the next few days. I’m sorry if the site is particularly ugly when you happen to visit. Everything’ll be straightened out soon.

More to come later.

=D