Guy: This day is just dragging on. Probably ’cause I’ve been here since four.

Me: Four?? What were you doing here an hour early?

Guy: I forgot about the time change. I thought it was tonight.

Me: TIME CHANGE?! *frantically looking for a clock* Wait, what time is it really?!

Apparently, technology is awesome, and my phone automatically adjusted itself at two a.m. like it’s supposed to. My alarm went off at the new time, I had had an extra hour of sleep without knowing it, and when I glanced at my wall clock while getting dressed… I guess I only glanced at the minute hand!

This is all probably a good thing because I always stress about time change. Wait, that was today, right? Did I look at the clock I actually changed? CRAP, what if I’m the only idiot in the world who changed their clock and it’s really NEXT WEEK??

In all fairness, the old laptop is now going to Tegan (my younger sister). and it was a loyal help for the past… oh at least five years. But the hard drive was small by modern standards, the display was painfully cramped when trying to do anything useful (Photoshop, anyone?), the CD drive was about shot… and the dumb thing would overheat unless I had it on a desk, propped up, with a fan blowing directly underneath. No wireless, nothing.

So now I have this shiny new laptop. Three times as much memory, twice as much screenular real estate, huge hard drive, and I’m over the moon. There’s only one setback… Windows Vista.

I’m a complete Mac fangirl and an XP loyalist, so I was expecting to loathe Vista right from the get-go. But you know what? It’s not so bad.

I mean, the “are you SURE you want to run this program??” gets kinda old fast. The sidebar is annoying and the folder structure takes some getting used to. I only opened IE7 long enough to get Firefox fast, but the five minutes I spent in there weren’t as bad as I thought it should have been. Things install quickly. Drivers are found automatically. You can change the background color in Solitaire. Everything is bright, friendly, and looks very polished and well-designed.

So yes, you heard it here, from a girl who swore she’d never switch from XP unless it was straight to OSX… Vista is not as bad as they say.

We haven’t been able to pull it away from him yet.

He’s not overly tech-savvy, but you had better believe that within five minutes he had iTunes loaded on to his computer, busy importing all of his music files, with the first twenty or so already loaded onto his iPod.

Today he came home and hopped straight onto his computer. “Mel! Come here!”

I went in to his room to see him triumphantly holding up a green card. “What is it?” I asked.

“25 iTunes dollars,” he replied. “Some guy gave it to me when he saw I had an iPod. What can I buy with it?”

“Music,” I responded. “99 cents a song.”

I have never seen my dad so happy. Who says iPods are just for young people and Apple geeks?

I just got this game that came out, Phase, and I’m in love with it. Seriously, I downloaded it last night and I’ve probably played about four hours worth of this silly game. It’s like DDR or Guitar Hero (both of which I’ve never played, mind you) in that it takes your music and turns it into a game. You basically have to keep on beat and “catch” the notes by hitting one of three buttons. Simple… yet really, really addictive. Just wanted to throw that out there for anybody else with a video-capable iPod. You must get this game!

My other newest love (okay, besides Robin Hood, but I won’t drool all over you guys today), is this site called Symbaloo. It’s kind of like Google’s personalized home page, but definitely more graphical. You kind of have to see it to understand it. It’s like playing with blocks, seriously… and it’s just replaced Bloglines.com as my new home page. You should go check it out.

Okay, that’s my shameless advertising for today!

One of the problems I found was my iTunes music. When I had transferred all of my music to my external drive, I didn’t delete my old music files from my first drive just yet. You know, just in case; I had bought some stuff from the iTunes store and I didn’t want anything to… not work. Except I never went back and deleted my old files.

iTunes stores its library information in a little file in your music folder… and apparently, my iTunes was still writing to the old library file.

Which, yesterday, I deleted. Imagine my surprise when I went to put two new songs onto my iPod and my iTunes was COMPLETELY EMPTY. Oh no!

I guess it’s okay. Then I can get my library organized anyway. Right? Ugh!

I… don’t really like Windows. I don’t really like my computer. However, it’s what I have to live with for a while, so I might as well tweak it so it’s the way I want it, right?

Disclaimer: This is just an informational, nerdy post I’m making after spending all day messing with my computer to get it working right again.

Beauty is in the Eye of the Beholder

Windows XP, which is what I’ve used most of the time I’ve been on computer, is complete eye-candy when compared to older versions. If you’re like me, though, this isn’t enough. WindowBlinds gives you almost full control of your desktop. You can download and switch between themes which can give you almost any look… from high-tech to a Mac look-a-like. It’s a paid program, but the free trial version does almost as much.

You can also tweak your fonts so they look smooth, and not so pixelly and rough by activating Clear Type. Right click on your desktop, and go to properties. In the appearance tab, go to the effects button. Check the second box (“use the following method to smooth the edges of screen fonts”) and choose “Clear Type.” Save, and voila! Bet you didn’t know that text could look so beautiful.

A Minimalistic Approach

I don’t know about you, but I hate icons on my desktop. It’s cluttered, it’s in the way, and it blocks whatever background image you have. I have absolutely no icons on my desktop, but I still have that functionality, due to an awesome program called Object Dock. It adds a bar across the top of your screen (which can autohide when you’re not using it) that hold icons to your favorite files and programs.

Too Much Junk

I can be obsessive-compulsive with programs, most often neat programs I find online. Sometimes I use them. Sometimes I don’t. Either way, they tend to really steal all the room on my hard drive, leaving me with a computer that functions about as well as, oh, a brick?

Uninstall everything you’re not using anymore. Get rid of old files that you don’t need (if you think you may possibly need them in the future, burn them to a disk and then delete them from your hard drive). Get rid of temporary internet files and cookies. If you use something like Outlook Express for your email (most don’t anymore), get rid of those five years of junk emails. Delete those pictures of your sixth-grade crush. Get rid of videos and mp3’s that you don’t watch or listen to anymore. Defragment.

This morning, when I woke up, I had about five percent free space on my main hard drive. Never fear, I’ve got an external drive for all of my files, but five percent of free space internally doesn’t work at all. I found a program which maps out your entire hard drive, graphically, you can see in a snap where all of your gigs are going: WinDir Stat. Seriously, it was a lifesaver. I ran it, had it scan my drive (which took about five minutes), and immediately saw some problems on my hard drive.

I deleted two folders and moved one video file to my external, and HALF of my hard drive was now free. Free!

In short: Make it your own

All of that is just to encourage some personality on your own computers, whether it’s your own or one that’s shared. Little things make all the difference. Change the desktop, the theme, the icons, the organization. Add widgets, a dock, a clock, a calendar. Autohide your taskbar or leave it alone. Clean up and uninstall. Upgrade your memory (I’m doing that this week) or get more elbow room in the hard drive department.

I think I’m also going to follow this up with an article on the must-have programs that I use every single day.

Hey, guys! I’m in Texas right now, having a blast. I’m sure you’ll get the full story when I’m coherent enough to care. But one thing I wanted to say (mostly for LB’s sake)… I really did get to play with an iPhone the other day. And I will say… they’re just as nice as they look. They had to drag me out of the Apple store eventually. Oh, it was nice.

At the same time, just like the world we live in… it’s also incredibly small (and if anyone starts singing that Disney song, I’ll cry). No really, hear me out. I was thinking about this earlier. Before the Internet, it was very easy to forget about people. Maybe later, you’ll have a fleeting thought… I wonder what ever happened to What’s-his-face? You’d shrug, and get on with your day. You were probably busy milking cows or whatever it was we did to amuse ourselves before the Internet.

Now? I wonder what ever happened to What’s-his-face? Well, I’ll Google him.  Oh, he’s got his own website now! Hasn’t been updated in a while… so I’ll go search him on MySpace. Oh look… there he is! Man, he’s gotten cute. Really cute. Wonder if he’d still remember me after — oh, five or six years?

Boom! Now you’re history’s right up in your face again, which could be good or bad, depending on the situation. No, nothing prompted this, particularly, besides Meli having fun with MySpace searches the other day. It’s just weird how the Internet doesn’t let you forget… both the good and the bad.

Pictures of all kinds, I suspect, shall be coming soon. YAY!

Okay, nerd relapse. I got this book from the library. Wait, wait, let me back up. I have this thing for the “Dummy” books. If I don’t know anything about a subject, I love to browse through them and get a gist of what’s going on. If it’s a book concerning something I know pretty well, I love to read through and tell them what they’re getting wrong or teaching stupidly (read: German, web design, or the like). So, wandering through the library the other day (well, you missed the part about the old ladies and the “tachyon” music, but that’s really a long story), I picked up this book called “Head First HTML” yadda yadda.

Ha, I thought, picking the book up. This oughta be good. Shawna, you’ll especially appreciate this. Every time I pick up a book like this, they teach you the old, outdated, clunky, stupid way, and then halfway through the book they try and fix their mistakes and attempt to teach you the right way.

This one was actually pretty good. By chapter three we had a website built, by chapter six we were validating on the W3C page using XHTML, and we NEVER ONCE used the <font> tag, the “bgcolor” attribute, or any image without an alt tag.

Q: My friend showed me a cool trick where he did all of his page layout right within a table. He didn’t even have to use CSS!

A: Go straight to CSS jail. Do not pass go; do not collect $200.

Shawna, I don’t know what you should be prouder of… me picking up this book and already knowing most of it… or the fact that I was cheering them on.

Okay, no more nerdiness today. I’m off to bed.

Number one. WordPress. I told you I upgraded to the newest version (2.1 – Ella)… but let me tell you, it’s wonderful. I mean, it’s still the same-old blogging tool, and it mostly looks the same, but the more I use it, the more I discover little things I like.

For example, drafts. I can get halfway through this post and then decide that Tegan and I are going to go watch Hidalgo and that I’ll finish this post later. I can either save it as a draft (and I could do that before), or it will autosave it for me every so often (If you’ve used Gmail before, you know the feature I mean). Also, I can do this with pages now! If you go to “writing” in the top menu, you get a 404 error. Actually, the page is there. It’s just in draft form so I can work on it without messy construction pages. Pretty neat, I’d say!

Number two. PHPBB. If that was gobbledygook to you, let me explain. It’s the forum software that I’ve used for many many different forums… CYF, HF, and now TTF. Well, since I’ve got PHP installed on my computer now that I use for layouting for wordpress and such, I decided to install phpbb on there so I could work on Caleb’s layout without messing up the actual forum. Well, I did that… but then I got lured into the PHPBB3 beta testing pages.

Me? A beta tester? Goodness, no. I’m just a “noob.” Actually, I’m not anymore. I’m realizing that more and more. So, um, I’m beta-ing PHPBB3 now. I installed it about fifteen minutes ago and I’m already head-over-heels in love with it. It’s like version two, but hyped up on pixie-sticks. Oh goodness, you can do everything. Custom profile fields. Custom BBCode. Attachments. Mass PM-age. Easier usergroups. Neater filing on the back end. Moderator logs. Group colors. Bot logging.

This might be worth resurrecting a certain dead forum. The minute this is distributed in a stable, user-ready version, I’m upgrading every forum I own. I’m in love. I’m head-over-heels, nerdily in love.

Sometimes, life gets busy.

What? Four percent free space on my hard drive? WHAT? How did that happen? I don’t even have enough free space on my drive to defragment (which pretty much rearranges files so you have more free space, by the way). Dang it!

And so I break out the virtual garbage bags and now I’m sludging my way through all of my files, getting rid of anything and everything that isn’t tied down. I tried to rename my Recycle Bin to The Dumpster, but it didn’t clean things up any better.

Good grief, I have a lot of files! They make iPods bigger than my hard drive!

PS: Our cell phones are in the mail. They’re sending us new phones anyway. Hey, we’ll have backup. So definitely leave a message if you’ll want my number.

Okay, so my dad has had one forever. He used to have one of those GoPhones back before we moved, but he ended up giving it to my grandmother because a 717 area code wouldn’t do us a bit of good in Oklahoma. He has one now on his partner’s family plan, but now he and my mom and I are all going in on our own family plan.

Oh my gosh! Meli’s going to be communicating. By PHONE, no less! So when I get my cell number, who wants it?

For my, errmm, four faithful readers. I have to get more people to read! HA.

So be on the lookout. OH yes, and I’m back!! And on the last night of Hanukkah I get a coughdigitalcameracough and so you get to see pictures of the new house!

HAPPY HANUKKAH!