In which the notebook is here! The notebook is here!! OMFG the notebook is here!!!
UPS’s site said my Eee PC wouldn’t get here until Wednesday, but it was sitting on my desk when I got to work yesterday morning. Squee!
It’s tiny. It’s über-cute. It’s portable. It has killer battery life. It came with its own little slipcase and I can carry it around in my bag. It has a video port and can drive a huge monitor! It has three USB 2.0 ports and a micro SD card slot!
I installed Firefox (and WeatherFox and Foxmarks) and FileZilla and BOINC and SETI@home and VLC and iTunes. I put my favorite wallpaper on it. I scowled at the pre-installed Microsoft Works. (Microsoft WORKS?!) I touched it all over. I showed it to my co-workers.
And then I took it to the bar last night. In my bag! Tiniest little device ever!
Oh, and it picks up wireless from the foot of my bed, which is as far as you can get from the router and still be inside the house. Even the iPod doesn’t see the router from there!
Right now I’m copying my iTunes library onto it. (God, I love USB 2.0. I can move my entire library in about half an hour.) When I put the hard drive back into the old IBM Thinkpad A30, I’m going to give it to Left Coast Girlie for her birthday!
In other news, I read the two most recent inauguration speeches last night. In my opinion, Bush’s was stilted and entitled and Obama’s was moving and uplifting. Those who were disappointed by Obama’s speech should relax a little; half the nation wouldn’t recognize ‘a unifying theme’ if it poked them right in the eyeball.
In which I get the first of many packages.
When I got to work this morning my new phone, an LG Lotus LX600, was on my desk.
I unpacked it, which required opening about six plastic bags and removing five plastic clingies from various of the phone’s shiny surfaces, and plugged it in. Then I checked the quick start manual, and unplugged it from AC power and plugged it straight into one of my PC’s USB 2.0 ports.
I went to sprint.com to activate the phone, but I couldn’t log in…
…so I had to give it to my brother (who is the primary name on our shared cell phone account) to activate it. It was gone FOREVER. I nearly DIED. But then he brought it back and it was finally a properly activated phone!
I love the form factor. It’s square and somehow manages to be chunky and sleek at the same time. It weighs less than my old pink Katana.
It tells me – verbally, not in the form of a dialog notification – when I get text messages. “Message received,” it says. How cute is that?
I love the qwerty keyboard. (It’s a text freak’s dream device.) It’s also an MP3 player (not that I need yet another one of those) and its on board speakers are the best I’ve ever heard from any phone or iPod.
It can be mounted as an external hard drive by clicking the Home icon > Tools > USB Mode (4) > Select Transfer Music or Mass Storage or Phone as Modem or PictBridge. You can move images to and from the device, and put MP3s on it as well.
It has a built-in Google app, Sprint Navigation (a GPS map app), a browser (Opera Mini can be installed instead), and a nicely configurable interface. There’s a built-in doc viewer but I haven’t tested it yet. It takes video.
I will spend my evening transferring my contacts manually, because I’m both too cheap to buy the backup feature and too lazy to take both phones over to Sprint to have them moved.
Long story short: I love the new phone! Can’t wait ’til Notebook Wednesday. This week is totally gonna rock.
In which I publicly admit to stealing resources* from my employer.
I’ve been running a little eBay side business from my desk this week. In between calls I’ve watched my auctions, printed shipping labels (with the work printer, on the work paper*), and packed Priority Mail cartons with old electronics (and taped them shut with work tape*).
I made $282.11 from four auctions. This amount is over half what I paid for the items originally, but that little bit of awesomeness isn’t even the point. The point is that if you write a good item description on eBay, you can sell ANYTHING. Even if it’s old and crappy!
The eBook sold for $101.11, which is about $15 less than a brand new one costs. (I under-quoted shipping, though, so I ended up having to spend an extra $4.55 to get the thing mailed off, making my net $96.56, which is still more than I expected to get.) One of the Pocket PCs, the e400, sold for $36 to a company that sells refurbished devices and I’m wondering if they’ll part it out or resell it on their website. The final Pocket PC sold for $99 to what sounds like a company name rather than an individual so it may find itself re-refurbished or parted out, too.
The best part of all this is that the money I got (plus $130 in Xmas money) has allowed me to order this:
[You are now hearing a very loud, angelic “AAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!,” btw.]
Innit ADORABLE?!?!!? It’ll be here next Wednesday.
It’s an ASUS Eee 900HA 8.9″ notebook with a 160GB hard drive, a 1.6Ghz ATOM processor, and pre-installed XP Home. (I was going to order another gig of RAM too, but they were out, so that will have to wait until I can find it elsewhere.)
I also bought an external USB CD+DVD-RW drive because my new, tiny, adorable little ASUS laptopette doesn’t have a built-in drive. I don’t want to have to share a drive over my network just to watch a movie or burn a CD.
The moral of this story is that you can totally sell old junk on eBay, and use the proceeds to buy shiny new things!
Now, can somebody make it next week already so that I can start playing with my new notebook, plz? Kthxbai.
—
*I probably owe BMI about 6 minutes of unpaid work after all that rampant thievery.
**This public admission of unlawfulness is all part of my attempt to join my brother in his county jail weight loss regime.
In which today brings a us recipe!
Left Coast Girlie says: “Here’s the yakimandu recipe. You can remove the meat and use tofu and veggies like mushrooms and cabbage…. Thought I’d share.”
Yaki Mandu
2 pkg. (30 sheets each) wonton wrappers
1 lb. lean ground beef or chopped sirloin
2 medium carrots, chopped
1 large onion, chopped
20 to 25 medium mushrooms, chopped
1 pkg. (12 oz.) firm tofu
2 green onions, chopped
3 cloves garlic, minced
1 Tbsp. sesame oil
1 Tbsp. sugar
1 tsp. freshly ground black pepper
1 tsp. toasted sesame seeds
1/4 cup soy sauce
1 egg, lightly beaten
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In which I’m fat, obsessed with bento, and refusing to see any possible correlation between the two.
Misc
Teh BF’s bento box arrived so I packed a lunch in it and gave it to him today. He seems pleased. My mom has emailed that she needs sci-fi, so I’ll be lugging a pile of books to the post office this week. My eBook auction was up to $102.50, but then the hapless individual who’d bid it that high must have done some comparison shopping and discovered s/he could buy a new one for fifteen dollars more, and retracted! I was disappointed, to say the least.
…aaaaaaaand here’s a gratuitous iThing screenshot of my eBay app, from last night when I was still making bank on the eBook:
Spring
The weather is wonderful. I walked to work today without a coat on! I saw bees today! This is the kind of mild winter weather I moved here for; screw that Midwestern-style frozen tundra crap.
Fat
I weighed and measured my body this morning. HOLY SHIT. It has gained 11 pounds and 2.5 inches (in girth, not height, sadly) since I got a boyfriend. This is empirical proof that men make me fat. So, yeah, thanks for asking, I’m totally on a diet now… and will remain so, to varying degrees, until I can cut my own damn toenails again without running out of air. Water, walking, and isometrics are now my life. Damn.
…it will be interesting to see whether I’ll choose food or cocktails for dinner tonight, though. I have between 386 – 736 calories remaining today, so I might be able to have a little of both. Yay!
In other (very exciting!) news, I’ve made an online friend through Flickr and she and I have arranged a swap. She’s sending me a bunch of bento-junk love in exchange for things she can’t get in Japan: Tillamook cheeses, crackers (like Triscuits and Wheat Thins), Mexican hot chocolate, and Neutrogena eye cream.
I can’t wait to get my box of authentic bento junk from Japan! Whee!
In which I shamelessly plug my auctions.
This week I’ve listed four items for sale on eBay:
- An old Gameboy Advance SP (sold!)
- an eBookwise 1150 ebook reader
- a Toshiba e400 Pocket PC, and
- a Dell Axim X51 Pocket PC.
I did this because I no longer need, want, or use any of these items. And why is that?
Because my iPod Touch replaces them all! (Thanks, work! Best Xmas present from an employer EVER!)
Let’s gaze a moment at it, shall we?
Aw. Innit cute? I love my iThing.
Twitter! Surfing! Ebooks! Games! Facebook! Music! Movies! And it even has an eBay app, so I can conveniently track my auctions while I’m at the bar!
This may be the most perfect device EVAR. (Except for the part where I still have to carry a cell phone. And it’s only 8GB instead of 120GB, so I still need my other iPod for my music collection. And no free Office doc reader. But whatever.) SO deeply in lurve.
In which we’ll miss the little poodlet.
G’ma had to have Chipper, her poodle mix, put down last Wednesday.
He’d gotten despondent and the vet had put him on meds for diabetes; G’ma and my brother took turns sticking him with a needle twice a day. A week later he was vomiting repeatedly and was one morning nearly non-responsive. G’ma had my uncle take him back to the vet.
Infection in the pancreas, possibly, or cancer; followed by not eating or drinking, followed by emergent renal failure. Rather than subject a twelve-year-old dog to possibly pointless exploratory surgery, she opted to have him put him to sleep. He’s buried out at the farm in Dave’s pet cemetary.
Bye bye, Chipper-doodle, you were a wonderful, weird, and sweet little dog.
In which we were out of town for 26 hours and it was HELLA FUN!
Teh BF asked our employer if we could leave at six o’clock on New Year’s Eve. Our employer agreed! So we checked the weather, talked it over, and then gleefully took mmmFiber up on her offer to overnight at her place in Portland for New Year’s Eve.
Of course, I was stuck on the phone until 6:17, but we were pulling out of the BMI parking lot at 6:21. We made the trip in three and a half hours, and arrived at Adie & Adam’s a little after ten. They gave us champagne, we changed, Adie gave me a cute hat, and then we went out. They live right near Alberta street, which has several blocks of cute stores and pubs.
We went to four different bars, stopping at a couple of them a second time on the walk back home. We got drunk and rambunctious and hollered “Happy New Year!” to complete strangers. We discovered “the Alberta”: a cocktail made of lemon, orange, vodka, and lime juice muddled with fresh basil. I made Teh BF buy me a blingy ring from this awesome hustler chick (I thought she was awesome because (a) I was drunk, and (b) she was, like me, wearing fucking Crocks in Portland. In the rain. Like an idiot. Who the hell wears shoes with HOLES IN THEM in Portland?!) that we’d met on the walk from one bar to another. Then he ordered me some awesome black bean nachos because we were drunk and had not had dinner.
We went back to the house and drank more and talked and played with the dogs – they have two terriers, a Schnauzer and a Cairn – and hung out until the wee hours of the morning.
Six hours later we were up again. After coffee we went to the Chapel Pub for bloody marys and brunch. Then we took the light rail downtown and stopped at the Thirsty Lion, mostly to get out of the rain. Then we took the train back to the car, and the car back to the house, where we watched an episode of Red Dwarf.
Then we collected our stuff and Bindu and drove home. Whirlwind 26-hour vacation! Whee! I HAD DO MUCH FUN OMGWTFBBQ.
Back in W2, we pulled into the driveway, marched right down the stairs, and held the couch down until bedtime. I slept like a rock last night.
In which I want the whole Intarwebz to know how good those folks are over at Valley Vision.
Last month, I acknowledged that I really could not see anything clearly any more. I know what traffic signs say because of their shape and color, but I had to admit I really could no longer truly see them, and that on those rare occasions when I do drive I’m probably a heinous menace to everyone else on the road.
I asked a local where I should go; Teh BF – who doesn’t even wear corrective lenses, and was therefore mostly just guessing – said I should “try Valley Vision, over on Main.”
So I went to their website to get their phone number, and discovered that I could not only make an appointment online, but I could also fill out and submit the intake sheet before even setting foot in their offices! And I received an email confirmation! The next morning, they called me to confirm my appointment! Awesome.
When I went to my first appointment, the receptionist greeted me immediately. She explained the fees, and allowed me to walk over and make a payment in advance while I was waiting. My time in the waiting room was barely five minutes, and all the front office service was fast, friendly, and professional.
I went through the various stages of my exam with no waiting; the doctor came in immediately after the assistant was finished with me, and when all that was done I was escorted over to the optician to choose frames for my new glasses and he helped me immediately.
With my old contact lenses in, I was seeing 20/100. That’s, like, half legally blind, people. Totally should not be driving a motor vehicle like that! (It’s amazing how the brain works; it really will fill in an awful lot of missing information by drawing on experience. It’s why people can listen to transistor radios and think what they’re hearing is music: their brains fill in all the missing resonances.) I have mild presbyopia (loss of focusing ability), but not enough to need bifocals – thank God. (This is a really cool article for those of us who have never understood what the hell their optometrists were talking about.)
When I picked up my glasses, they service was again fast and friendly. When I picked up my contacts, I was given an exam by the doctor to make sure they fit and was asked back in two weeks for a follow-up.
Today the doctor checked the fit of my lenses extensively (even used yellow dye to check tear pooling under the lenses), gave me another Snellen chart exam, and determined I actually need another set of stronger lenses. I can pick them up next week and give them back the ones I have now.
Over all, killer service. I am now able to actually see things, and when I get my new new lenses I’ll be able to see EVEN MOAR. (I’ve been wearing gas permeable hard contact lenses for twenty years and never had a doctor have me back for two follow-ups and then give me another set of lenses to make it right. HOW HOT IS THAT?!)
In other VERY EXCITING news, we’re going to see Adie & Adam in Portland for New Year’s Eve. Hopefully I-84 down the Gorge will be clear, and we’ll get there in time to actually go out before the year changes!
In which I tell you what I got for Xmas!
Christmas day was fun. I slept in, which is always awesome. Then I vacuumed the living room, helped G’ma with food preparation, set up the card table and found chairs. Around 1:30 the family showed up.
We ate, opened gifts, and then had dessert. It was a lovely afternoon.
Behold the awesome goods I received:
- a cute hand-crocheted hat
- a wallet
- a Dalek cell phone charm!
- a gift certificate for a cut & color with my stylist
- a towel and some bath soak
- an Amazon gift certificate
- $15 cash
- a bag of food: pasta, brownie mix, candy, and more
- a salad cook book
- a gift bag with pens, oranges and cookies
A pretty awesome haul, methinks! Apparently there will be more when we see the rest of the family; G’ma said my aunt Sue has her gift for me, and my cousins and other aunt & uncle will probably show up at some point for belated gift exchanges. The damn weather kept half the family from coming to Walla Walla, so we still have a big pile of unopened gifts for them under the tree.
Which means we get to have Christmas AGAIN later! Yay!
How’d you all make out? Anybody get anything really wonderful?
Update: Also got a bitchin’ solar system poster from ThinkGeek!
VSCO
Instagram has become unusable crap, so please click the icon below to see my latest pics.
4 random books from my Library!
