ninja mode

Trying to get back in the habit of this blog thing. Seems I took a break from it over winter break and now I’m not too sure how to pick it back up again. But here goes.

Got a new laptop. Toshiba Tecra M4 tablet. Mmmm. She is named “Raider” after the nasty, butt-kicking cylon ships in the new Battlestar Galactica series because I was getting sick of the “fruits and vegetables” name scheme. Also it seemed somewhat more fitting. :B Cliff bet me $10 that there would be stickers on it by the end of the month. I bet not, because I didn’t actually intend to put stickers on her nice shiny case already….but I sort of couldn’t help myself. So I lost. After an entire weekend of having the thing. Yaaay.

You know, I’m not entirely certain exactly why it is, but it seems that no one (who is not someone I know well or from work or knows me otherwise, etc.) never believes I know anything about computers when I can clearly explain and demonstrate that I do. It just gets rather frustrating, especially in a particular class with somewhat heavy computer usage. We were told to borrow microphones from the art resource thing for this audio project we’re doing, and there weren’t enough for everyone, so I offered to use my own equipment so that someone else could take a set. The teacher gave me a blank look of “what? You have your own equipment and might be capable of doing this without handholding? What? Well….okay. I guess…” I just find that mildly irritating. I have a microphone that is more than decent, I have a voice/audio recorder built into my camera, and I know how to format the files properly so that I can stick them on a CD and import them into my project. That and I don’t particularly want to partner up with anyone because that means they’re equally as responsible for the equipment as you, and if they screw it up or lose it or break it, I’m in just as deep as they are. And judging by what I’ve seen of them so far, I’m just not interested in getting myself into that. So I’ll gladly work alone, thanks. Just…arrrg.

We got out of class early today, to have time to go work on recordings. In theory I could work on it now, I just don’t know what I want to record yet. Or at least I don’t know what would be interesting for something like this. So I guess that makes it lunchtime then. :9

Yeah. About this blog thing… …I’ve been… …busy? Sorta.

What to write what to wriiiiite….

Okay, story time.

My car is sort of “special”. It is tank-like, I’ll give it that. It’s survived being underneath falling trees and…well, me. But it makes crazy noises and tends to spout random problems. Like the brakes deciding rather stubbornly that sometimes they’re not gonna be as effective as they ought to be, or one of the wheels just dangling by mere threads when it goes to get fixed for something completely different.

But what I have found to be by far the most unique of my car’s unusual habits is this game it plays with the fuel gauge. You see, you can be driving along thinking you have over a half tank of gas, and suddenly it’ll start dropping…and dropping… and HEY WHERE’D MY GAS GO??! And the car dies a painful, agonizing death, until one pulls to the side of the road and calls their mother for assistance. I have seen it go from full to empty in mere minutes, what should be a superhuman..err…supervehicular? task for even the biggest of American SUV’s. Other times it’s completely normal, not a problem in the slightest from point A to point B. This cause of this problem is that the gas tank was replaced at one point, and not everything sits quite as straight as it should.

I like to refer to this game mentally as “gas tank roulette.”

Will I make it to school? Will the car die halfway?? How far can I scrape by on one tank of gas?!? STAY TUNED TO FIND OUT…

Needless to say, driving to school is an adventure every day.

This morning I meant to stop and get gas before I went to school, thinking that I was probably running really low, and since it’s snowing and all it wouldn’t have been much fun to get stuck halfway to school in the cold. But I was running really late as it was, so I decided (stupidly) to push my luck and see if I could make it, at least to school, because if I could make it that far I would at least be able to make it to a gas station on my way home.

I come back to the car at the end of the day, start it, and head out. Half a tank. Odd, that’s more than I had when I started… Eventually it evens out to about 1/4 tank, and sits there, steady. It stays this way until about ten feet from the entrance to the gas station, at which point it dropped to nothing. I maaade it.

CLEARLY, THIS ALL MEANS THAT I WIN AT DRIVING. OR SOMETHING.