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.

But of course…VMWare Player. Why didn’t I think of this before?

I’ve been using OpenOffice since I got my new laptop toward the beginning of the school year. My old one had Microsoft Office but this didn’t; it would have cost more to get it. The Word and Excel equivalents are great, but I cannot figure out the PowerPoint equivalent to save my life! I keep having to go to the computer labs at school to work on presentations. But it turns out there might be an easy way around this: academic pricing. Hey, I’m a student now, I can get this stuff! For example, CostCaptain.com has the entire Office 2007 suite for $129. (Although actually, none of the computers at school have higher than Office 2003, so getting 2007 might not be the best thing to do.) They also have Adobe PS Elements 5 for $100 which is about the same as the academic pricing direct from Adobe! (I know this because my father in law wanted to use my academic discount to buy a copy. Ahem.)

• Thanks to mornhyland’s mention of it via Twitter, I am now using Backpack. The requirements on the site say you need SP2 and Blackboard 7.2, but I don’t have SP2 and my school is running Bb 7.1, but it seems to work pretty much okay. I think the discussion board stuff isn’t getting downloaded, so that part must require 7.2, but other than that it works! I was exchanging emails with the academic technology department, and they say I’m the first Gallaudet student to use Backpack.
• My computer shipped! My computer shipped! My computer shipped! *dies*

I will admit, there are some files on my computer that I don’t want anybody else to see. There’s nothing BAD in them exactly…just kind of embarrassing stuff. And oddly, they’re not files I expect to need on a regular basis - just notes that I might want to refer to at some point in the future. It would be great if I had a way to zip them up and protect them; that’s where SecureZIP - the next generation of zip - comes in. It’s by PKWare, the original makers of PKZip software, which I used to use many moons ago - the company has been around for a while. At their website, www.securezip.com, you can download their free secure zip software. Using this software allows you to store files that may contain protected information, like tax records, without taking up a lot of space on your hard drive. While other zip software just uses a password to protect the data, SecureZIP uses actual encryption. It also integrates with Outlook, so you can use it to send secure data that your recipient will be able to view. It’s well worth checking out if you have a lot of sensitive data on your computer and you don’t want just anyone to be able to see it!

My work has blocked MySpace for a long time. It’s no big deal, I don’t use MySpace much anyway. I set up my own copy of CGIProxy and it was serving me well. Today I noticed that apparently eBay and Photobucket have also been blocked, or are at least not coming up - but they do fine through my proxy. Ditto for CreamAid, which I just wanted to check out but couldn’t get to…huh. Anyway, it’s rather annoying that Photobucket is blocked, because this screws up my LiveJournal friends page…feh. I will have to re-host the images via Imageshack or something.

But even more annoying is that MySpace is apparently now channeling your login through a secure server…which CGIProxy doesn’t want to let me access. It should work, as far as I can tell…I have the requirements taken care of. I’m not running on a secure server, but this is for accessing MySpace, not processing payment information - I don’t care if it’s secure. But the error message I’m getting is basically “zomg somebody might EAVESDROP on you wtfbbqpolarbear!!!eleventy1one!!” Again…it’s MySpace. I don’t care. Please to be allowing me to talk to the secure server now.

If anybody has a secure server and wants to host a password-protected (.htpasswd is fine) copy of CGIProxy for me, that would be teh awes0me. Meanwhile I will wait to hear back from the script author.

Added: Oh, YouTube is blocked too.

Update: The script author clued me in to $OVERRIDE_SECURITY and all is well now. Except for Photobucket, because I can’t add pictures to the albums at all…sigh.

My 80GB Snazzy McSnazzersons Video iPod is waiting at home for me! They had said it would be there on the 19th, but I was kind of hoping it would turn up today. I wasn’t able to print the official “shipment release authorization” form due to a lack of a functioning printer, so I handwrote a page that had similar information (I authorize FedEx to blah blah…for this tracking number..please leave…this page is equivalent to your actual form…[signature]) and taped it up on the door, hoping that would be good enough.

I just printed out the official form (at work) in case I needed to use it for tomorrow, but then I checked the FedEx tracking number:

Dec 18, 2006 - 11:27 AM - Delivered - Left at front door. Package delivered to recipient address, release authorized

And then I squealed in my head a lot! I am very excited about trying it out when I get home. I already used the Videora iPod Converter to make the CSI:NY episode Silent Night iPod-compatible, and last night I downloaded SG-1’s episode 200 and Atlantis’s The Real World via BitTorrent (thanks clayfoot!) because I’d never seen them. So I plan to convert those to iPod format too, whee!

Did I mention that I’m excited? Did I mention that the iPod’s hard drive is twice the size of my laptop’s hard drive? Did I mention that I can’t wait to get home? Wheeeeeeee!

Oh my god! I got ePSXe to run on my laptop and I can play Playstation games on my laptop! I haven’t quite got the configuration right…sound effects play but music does not, which means Bust-A-Groove is much harder to play than on the PSX. But it handles import games (it’s the Japanese version of Bust-A-Groove, which was called Bust-A-Move) beautifully! I might have to look into getting a controller thing so I can use the regular controller rather than trying to play off the computer keyboard.

Oh my god IT WORKS!

Tonight A and I are babysitting the store for :MK&R:, who are at a baseball game. (The only other employee got free tickets to a Nine Inch Nails concert tonight, so he’s not available either.) We were reading books over on the couch, but some Real Live Customers™ showed up so we moved over to the checkout counter. I’m using the other employee’s personal laptop - if I’d known they had wireless, I’d have brought my own - so I opened Internet Explorer so I wouldn’t mess up his Firefox session by logging into a bunch of stuff. I logged into WordPress, and I noticed a rather large Browse Happy logo at the bottom of every page. I didn’t recognize it, so I went into Firefox and checked - and sure enough, it’s not there. Interesting that they’ve got browser-specific coding going on; I tried to do that using this method and it didn’t work.

It’s been about half an hour between when I wrote this entry and now, when I’m going to hit Publish; we just had major adventures with actual customers buying actual products and hopefully we didn’t break stuff…although it was very interesting trying to figure out store credit, and DJ discount on the CD only even though she was purchasing something else, etc…whew.

Thanks to inspiration from the Quilting Bee message board, I spent today messing about with fanlistings. I had tried before to convert to Enthusiast 3 and it broke horribly, so I gave up and went back to Fanbase. This time I managed to get all seven of my owned FL’s converted successfully from Fanbase to Enth3, and tonight I manually converted 135+ joined FL’s from Flinx to Enth3. The amusing thing is that I spent many hours today doing something that is utterly pointless - there is no meaning behind fanlistings whatsoever. If you want to see what I was working on, though, my joined and owned fanlistings are now here.