katiefoolery

I think I'm in love with my computer. Is that wrong? I mean, sure, I've been quite fond of computers in the past, despite their tendency to be incredibly irritating and/or stop working entirely. And I do like my netbook quite a lot, mostly due to its smallness, cuteness and general state of shininess.

But I think I've fallen in love with my notebook.

Maybe it's because I've always had a desktop computer as my main machine. It's rather difficult to fall in love with one of those: they're giant, they get in the way and they're damned noisy. Whereas, there's my HP, with its pretteh swirly cover, its shiny screen, its generously-sized keyboard and its relative lack of noise. Not to mention its remote control. I won't go in to how excited I was to discover the remote lets me control whatever music programme I happen to be using at the time, not just Windows Media Centre.

And I subsequently won't go in to the fact that I was excited about this despite being fully aware of the fact that I usually won't need to use said remote, because I'll be sitting right in front of my computer while I'm playing music on it.

But you never know. Maybe, one day, I'll need to use that remote and it will be so convenient when that day arrives. Provided I've remembered to keep the remote with me, rather than leaving it slotted in its housing in the computer.

EVEN SO.

I'm not alone in this laptop-love, though, am I? There must be other people out there who adore their computers and fret about them if they ever have to be sent away. Yes? Yes? Tell me yes.

P.S. I wrote more words! And I have many more stuck in my head which shall be extracted tonight, assuming I don't get distracted by the shininess that is my computer. :D

Well, I did mention it in my first vlog: I like shiny things.

And I have a new shiny thing.

(Can you see my webcam sitting on the box beside the computer? Doesn't it look like it's staring right at you? I swear, the thing watches me...)

This lovely, shiny thing is replacing my old desktop, which was dodgy from the word go. On the up side, it had the entire Office 2003 suite on it. On the down side, I'm not sure it was entirely legal...

And now, on a completely random note, I would like to know why I look at the keyboard, note where the delete key is... and then press the home key instead. IT IS ANNOYING.

It feels weird to be without a desktop computer. I've always had a desktop computer. It's not as though this one's all that portable, though - it's a desktop replacement computer, after all. I'm not going to be carting it with me to work or anything.

No, that's what my netbook's for. :D

And in other news, I have already recorded my vlog A DAY IN ADVANCE. I'm worried. The last minute is when I do things, not a day in advance. I may have doomed us all to... doom.

Current Mood: organised

Please let me introduce you all to my new workspace, viz:

Yes, it is a) outside, b) sharing space with a spade and broom, and c) awesome. And that lovely little EeePC there answers the question of whether I switched my laptop for a netbook quite nicely. I haven't regretted that for a minute - it's even been inadvertently useful for my vlogging, due to its possessing a (completely rubbish) webcam. My intention was to buy an Acer Aspire One... but the ten inch screen of the EeePC kept calling to me, telling me how... big it was.

Well, ten inches is big when compared with eight point nine...

What innuendo?

I like being outside. I like having my own space. I like being able to sit there in that incredibly ugly yet unbelievably comfortable chair and think.

Oh, and write, maybe.

And I definitely like the bit where I receive an excellent wireless signal from my router. That's important.

I feel as though I can write out there - as though I have enough space to be creative. It's a different story inside, where I'm sharing space with noise and televisions and people. Which I don't really mind, per se, but that environment doesn't seem to be very conducive to creativity. Sometimes, I wish I were able to write anywhere, but it turns out I can be incredibly picky about my surroundings.

So, before I go off to work on my next vlog, I'm going to ask you all a question: Can you write anywhere? Do you have a place where your writing just seems to flow effortlessly? Conversely, are there places where you just can't write, no matter how hard you try?

Yes, one question in three parts.

brb, vlogging

:D

Current Mood: inquisitive

It’s December. Does someone want to explain how that happened? Last time I looked, it was October. November appears to have passed in some kind of crazy, magazine-induced blur. One minute, Spring’s just starting, hayfever is kicking in and the end of the school year seems to be several centuries away. Then...

*blink*

...there’s no time left to do anything and the shops have started playing Christmas music, for some inexplicable reason.

Couldn’t be because it’s almost Christmas, could it?

Things have happened in the meantime, though. We finally got the school magazine finished; all it took was some insane hours of work and a slightly elastic deadline. And if anyone needs an A4-sized page of coloured photos seamlessly merged into a montage, then look no further. I have a technique so finely-honed it could lop your fingers off if you got too close.

In more mundane news, I got a new photo for my licence that actually looks somewhat decent. This freakish occurrance is nicely balanced out by the utterly hideous passport photos I had to have taken for the WWC check. Honestly, they’re almost nauseating. I don't really have a forehead that large, do I? Or no hair at all?

*double-checks*

And in happier news, I have a new laptop! And I love it! Even if it is another Compaq. I swore I’d never purchase another one as long as I lived... but it was so pretteh and affordable. And the keyboard is ridiculously superior to the one on my old laptop. I can type without feeling as though I’m going to punch through to the mysterious inner workings. This is considered a bonus in my view.

It’s running on Vista, though. I think I can live with this.

The best bit of all is that this one actually talks to the network. This is a noticeable improvement over my old laptop, although that did talk to the network initially. Then they had a fight and stopped talking to each other. Then made it up for a while. Then cut off communications entirely. Gods know what they were saying to each other while all of this was going on.

Also:
*makes note to try and stop bumping the touch-pad in the middle of typing*

That’s on the verge of becoming annoying.

And now I must run off and arrange to get my music onto this thing. Then it’ll start feeling a lot more like home.

Current Mood: happy

I’d be interested to know how people manage to use laptops for significant periods of time without utterly destroying them, I really would. How on earth do you do it?

I won’t deny that my laptop’s incredibly handy from time to time, especially when staying at one’s parents’ place for a few days, but... It really has no idea how close it came to utter and irreversible DESTRUCTION over this last weekend. How many times did it annoy to me to the point where I had to sit and breathe very deeply for a few minutes, whilst the urge to ANNIHILATE THE DAMN THING faded away? Lost count. And sometimes, that fading away process took quite a while. I think a little bit of it might still be lingering, actually... It’s probably a good thing that there are several rooms separating me from my laptop right now.

But in other news involving less mass destruction of items of technology... my iPod lives. My little (unfortunately pink) iPod mini has come back from the dead... and is working.

I can’t explain this at all.

Last October, it was completely dead.

And now it’s not.

The story begins a week or so ago, when my iriver player decided that it wasn’t going to accept any more music, no matter how I reasoned with it.

“But look,” I’ll tell it, “I have all this new music and I don’t know, wouldn’t it be kinda neat if I could listen to it on my long and tedious trips to and from work?”

To which, my iriver player will simply point at the music already on it and insist that it needs no more.

I beg to differ but I’m fighting a losing battle here. Also, its shuffle still sucks. A lot.

If my iriver player could manage an indifferent shrug, it would probably employ one at this point.

Which brought me to thoughts of my dead iPod and the fact that a new battery would bring it to life. So I plugged it into my computer, just to check how dead it was, and instead of the absolute, underwhelming nothing I was greeted with last time I tried that, a low battery symbol came up on the screen. It didn’t look like it was going to charge via the USB, though, so I got my wall charger back from the Bindi and... it charged. And then I connected it to my computer and updated all of my music... and it was still alive this morning.

I have no idea how long this situation will last, but it’s making me very happy while it does so.

Current Mood: pleased

Did you ever have one of those days when nothing seems to go right? And when you manage to fix one thing and feel all proud and full of shiny goodness... something else breaks instead?

That pretty much sums up yesterday afternoon for me.

It all started with my music. Or perhaps it started a few weeks ago, when I noticed my CD drive was getting less and less reliable. It had developed a wonderfully quirky habit of either making the most disturbing sounds when I inserted a CD or simply refusing to notice there was anything in the drive at all. I rarely use it, thankfully, but it’s been in higher demand since I got my iriver and needed to transfer the music I bought from iTunes onto said player. Since one of these steps involves writing an audio disc, I’ve developed a bit of a dependency on my CD drive.

On the up side, at least it was good enough to keep working for as long as it took to burn the new music I’d bought on Saturday.

The more annoying down side, of course, was the fact that it immediately stopped working once I’d done that. There I was, trying to move the music to my iriver programme with a notable and annoying lack of success. Not only did the drive stop working, it decided to drop off my system entirely. INCd had a little heart attack and sat in my system tray with an exclamation mark on it all evening.

I didn’t have a heart attack. I glared. And fumed. And raged at the unfairness of it all.

Luckily, there was always my laptop, with its lovely non-crashed hard-drive and its wonderful new battery.

Unfortunately, the wireless network decided that connecting was a newly unfashionable concept and my laptop, being a great follower of fashion, was going with this new trend. Not a huge issue, admittedly, but I had three CDs’ worth of music to upload and I was rather hoping I’d be able to use Gracenotes to cut out much of the work involved there.

Huzzah for me, though, for I learned how to release and renew my IP.

Pity it didn’t help.

But my brother knows how to fix these things - I shall ring him!

...If only he’d picked up the phone.

Then Google became my friend and I found a fix and it worked! Even if my laptop did beep very loudly at me before telling me I’d need to re-start and then taking the choice away from me.

Ah, look at that - I can connect to the network, Gracenotes has worked out what album that is and my music’s going onto iTunes!

You know what would make that a happier situation? If the song could rip at a faster rate than 0.1x. That’d be great. Then iTunes wouldn’t be estimating a thirty-five minute wait for a six minute song.

Thankfully, it got over that. Then the next step was to install my iriver programme on my laptop and put all of my new music onto my iriver player. This went without a hitch, for which I was both grateful and a little suspicious.

All in all, a process that should have taken no more than ten minutes ended up consuming most of an afternoon. And to think I was wondering where my weekend went...