For my non-techie friends: I swear I’ll stop obsessing about this soon.

So if I’m running Linux in Windows courtesy of VMWare Player, why can’t I run Windows in Linux the same way? I know it’s possible, so maybe I can just make that my solution. I mostly need to run Paint Shop Pro 9 (doesn’t play nicely with Wine, learning curve is too high on Gimp) and Microsoft OneNote (doesn’t play nicely with Wine and Linux equivalents don’t measure up; KeyNote works in Wine but it’s not pretty - I tried it). Although I’m using Ubuntu right this moment, it’s a bit laggy - no surprise since I’m running it on a virtual machine. But I want to do most of my work in Linux, so why not flip the software and make Windows my laggy OS? Of course, this brings up all kinds of issues with backing up data, partitioning, and who knows what-all else. But still, it’s an idea. It’s definitely the only way OneNote will run.

I’m writing this in a draft in Gmail because I can’t remember my WordPress password. The reason I can’t remember is I’m not on my normal computer operating system. raisinbottom emailed me today with questions about Ubuntu, and he mentioned Wubi, so I got all hyped up and spent the evening fighting with it. Again. My big problem, as usual, is the wireless stuff. When I mentioned to A what I was working on, she couldn’t believe it - I have installed and uninstalled Ubuntu at least four times now. I have a love/hate relationship with the damn thing. I was unable to get the wireless working, but I’m jacked straight into the network right now, so I can at least write this while in Ubuntu, save the draft, and go into Windows (where my passwords are all saved) and post it!

Anyway, today’s classes were pretty good. I enjoyed the project we did in Deaf Studies, and I was pleased to see another friend of mine is now in the class. A few other people joined too so it is now getting pretty crowded! More people came into my Linguistics class too, and it’s now huge, but we can’t get a bigger room so we are all jammed in tight in a semi-circle. It turns out one of the visiting students is emerge’s sister, I was tickled to find that out! I had some quibbles with some of the teacher’s opinions…I had asked about Gestuno, and then later I asked about Esperanto…and she tried to compare it back to Gestuno. In reality, Gestuno can be more accurately compared to Basic English, because Esperanto behaves very differently from either of those. She wouldn’t hear of it though - did I mention she’s excitable? Oh well.

I figured out my problem with the 4GB SD card I had bought. It wasn’t Dell’s fault that it didn’t work; I chatted with a representative and confirmed the slot is supposed to accept SDHC cards. It turned out to be a Microsoft XP problem, naturally. It fell under KB 934428, in which XP requires a hotfix to make it recognize cards 4GB or larger. Of course, the hotfix system takes forever to respond, you actually have to wait for a live person to respond, so I found the SDHC card hotfix online and that was that! Now my computer recognizes my 4GB SD card no problem. Yay!

Apparently when I got this computer I was temporarily stupid. For some reason I didn’t install ZoneAlarm, AVG, or Spybot-S&D. And they didn’t get transferred from my old computer either, probably because was still stupid. I noticed the ZA absence a couple of days ago and got a BSOD after installing it; just now I was doing nothing - I was talking to A with the computer idle on my lap - and I got another BSOD! Good grief. AND I apparenly forgot my blog password, I just had to change that. And I lost an entry I was writing in Notepad and hadn’t saved yet; fortunately I hadn’t written much when the BSOD randomly popped up. And my website design is messed up for no apparent reason…I didn’t change anything!!

Computers and I usually get along pretty well, but…yaaaaargh!

So thanks to kawaiibishounen I am now probably going to be addicted to The Sims Life Stories. It’s what The Sims should have been from the beginning - you can guide them through all parts of their lives, not just going to work and earning money and reaching the top. They have specific desires and lifetime goals and everything. Plus you can still build their houses, and it all runs nicely on a laptop! You can even have other programs running at the same time. It’s awesome.

Unfortunately I’m not playing it right now. We came over to the in-laws’ house because they are going on a road trip tomorrow, and we were invited to say goodbye and stuff. I brought my laptop to make sure I could connect to their network, but I didn’t bring the game CD because I figured it wasn’t needed. Nope! You needs it, precious, you needs it. Ah well…I’ll play when I get home, probably. Riley is just back from her first day of work; I made a Sims Stories blog to post screenshots for fun.

So the other day…I bought a new laptop. I ordered it from Dell, with whom my school has a discount program, and with whom I’ve been happy for many years. I currently use a Dell Inspiron 1150, which is quite serviceable but is starting to fall apart in little ways. It also has a crappy processor, which is why I couldn’t run SP2 worth a damn. So I bought a new one. Here’s the specs.

I’ve been writing a lot more code this week than I usually do. I successfully implemented email-to-Tracks on Dreamhost, which was not easy…it took about eight hours, but I finally made procmail my bitch and compensated for Dreamhost not allowing “localhost” for MySQL.

Then today, I was browsing around the vector art on iStockPhoto, where I’ve had two credits for a while. I found something I really liked, and in about five hours I made it into a holiday theme for my website - I’ll be unveiling that in a couple of weeks, there’s probably still minor tweaking needed. I wouldn’t dare release it as a WordPress theme, because it requires a lot of dependencies, but it’ll look good on my site for Valentine’s Day.

Can I just say that there is nothing in the world more annoying than not being able to find that one missing single quote or bracket or parenthesis or semicolon you need to make your code work?

This is a totally frivolous post. I was looking through the WordPress Theme Browser, and I made a list of themes I liked, so I’m posting that list here. They’re all free to download, so if you like them, go for it.

I got a 10-day free trial of World of Warcraft from cynica, because I wanted to see what all the fuss was about. First I downloaded the 2.84GB install file, which I had to delete after unzipping because I needed the space to do the install! Once that was finally installed, I discovered I had to download a half-gig update. I had a hard time getting that to install, and when I finally did I discovered I had another half-gig update to download! I ended up removing RollerCoaster Tycoon 3 from the machine, because I can always reinstall it; I also removed a bunch of my music, which freed up a few more gigs. After the trial is over, I will restore the music from my external hard drive.

So I finally got to play the game after hours of downloading and installing. I created an undead character first and then a human character; I ended up playing as the human for a while. I got her to be a Level 2 Mage by killing a bunch of demons - at least I assume that’s how that worked. One thing I really like a lot about the game is that all those gigs of storage on the computer translate to a much faster playing experience. One reason I’m not really into Second Life is because it has to download everything as you move around, whereas WoW stores everything on the computer and then just interprets the instructions it receives.

I wasn’t able to get any other human beings to talk to me. I saw some people talking on a general channel but I couldn’t figure out how to talk to them - I think it may be limited by the free trial account. I know several people who play WoW but I have no idea what server they’d be on or anything like that. I can see why WoW is appealing - it’s fun to run around killing things and improving your stats, and I imagine the role-playing servers are fun too - but I’m not sure why it’s Warcrack for so many people. I don’t expect to keep it past the 10-day trial, which means I have to remember to cancel because otherwise I’ll automatically be billed $15/month. I’m glad to see what all the fuss is about, but I think there are probably very similar combat/RP games - even MMORPG’s - that are less expensive, and perhaps less space-hogging on the computer. I might try to find some alternatives, just for fun.

For some reason my design is behaving strangely. In Firefox, some of the bubble titles are sitting right on the line as they’re supposed to, but others are a few pixels above the line. In IE6, all of the titles are sitting on all of the lines, but there are no descenders; I guess IE doesn’t respect z-index because adding that didn’t help. I don’t understand why some of them are behaving differently - they’re all displayed using <h2>.

And this is not actually related, but I also want to widgetize my sidebars. This is likely going to mean substantial modification to the original design, because the right-hand sidebar is not actually a sidebar - it’s embedded in the footer code. It should be a fun project to widgetize this design.

Oh, and my site title is the wrong color in IE, I will have to figure that one out.