the everyday adventures of sabrina

i'm happy, hope you're happy too

Browsing Posts published by sabrina

okay, *now* i’m putting the discover card back in its cage

10 May 2007 at 19:35 Comments off

on the advice of someone is really good at cutting through my bullshit (it’s greatly thanks to her, and my dad and stepmom, that i have a kitchen table) i went out and bought an elliptical trainer today. well, it wasn’t quite like she said, “what you need to do is go buy an elliptical trainer,” but she was like, “okay, if you hate the gym, then go ahead and avoid it and quit feeling bad about it, but just do something else.” and she helped me figure out how to manipulate the financial situation so i actually could feasibly do so. yay her!

i went home and popped online and started reading reviews. then i popped over to a little fitness equipment store in the neighborhood to check them out. because my new philosophy of life involves cutting off any avenues for anxiety that i possibly can (because otherwise i will spend all my time worrying about details and never actually get anything done), i found one i liked and just bought it on the spot without messing around. (hey, i did my homework beforehand. i have Consumer Reports!) i wound up going with a Spirit XE 125, which is an entry-levelish model — no fancy tilting or padded pedals, no heartrate-adjusted programs, etc., but it does have this rather nice little fan in the control panel that you can aim at your face, which frankly i think i’ll get more use out of, and my shoes already have poufy little gel thingies so what need have i of fancy-pants padded pedals? and as a special favor to my downstairs neighbor (whom i kept in mind the whole time — noise/vibration of her ceiling is the reason a treadmill was out of the question), it’s a super-quiet model — less noise than the professional models i’ve used before, actually, so i was quite pleased with that. plus it was 20% off (mother’s day sale! thanks mom!) and so even with sales tax (9%! thanks, mayor daley!) and delivery it came out to exactly $1.14 over its original sticker price.

so, i’m pretty excited. i love using elliptical trainers. i like treadmills too, but ellipticals are just sort of fun — especially when you go backwards. and i really do hate going to gyms — i hate being around other people while gross and sweaty — so this will be so much more pleasant. i can just hang out and enjoy using the machine without all the hassles and irritation and the damned televisions always tuned to something insipid and the horrible music and so forth and so on. i’m super excited. i can’t wait for them to call me on monday to arrange for delivery. i want my new toy now!

…of course, that does actually give me a chance to figure out where the heck in my living room i can put it. i guess i know what i’m doing this weekend!

chez niqui, health, slack none

so, i finally switched to zsh a while ago

8 May 2007 at 17:51 Comments off

Reasons I’m glad that I finally listened to what everyone was telling me, and switched to zsh:

  • * glob includes dotfiles too.
  • vi command-line editing in zsh is more kshlike than bashlike (and i hated bash’s behavior)
  • multi-line command-line editing is WAY better (ability to navigate all the independent lines of a multi-linefeed commandline without dealing with a thousand semicolons or forking a vi)
  • inline expansion is way better
  • OMG THE REDIRECTIONS SRSLY Y’ALL.

Reasons I miss ksh:

  • I don’t care for the caret-is-a-synonym-for-pipe behavior which zsh has helpfully reimplemented. Seriously, y’all. There is no need to backport original bourne shell features (that hardly anyone even knows about, much less uses) from 1968 anymore.
computers, lists, werk none

you know…

6 May 2007 at 11:14 Comments off

Dear Idiots Who Came Up With This Idiotic DVD Region Code Idiocy:

you know what, i actually bought these DVDs.

i would really appreciate it if you would quit making me have to jump through pointless hoops to work around region codes, which are totally ineffectual anyways in addition to granting absolutely no benefit to the consumer (especially not in the form of reduced costs to buy things due to reduced piracy since we weren’t exactly all flooding china’s shores to buy bad copies of Spider-Man and you are clearly just seizing on any excuse to continue to charge us stupid amounts of money that we, sheeple, happily pay).

but i digress. the bottom line here is QUIT FUCKING INSISTING ON YOUR STUPID WORTHLESS REGION BULLSHIT — RESTRICTING ME FROM WATCHING DISKS I PAID FOR — THAT I JUST HAVE TO GO AND CIRCUMVENT ANYWAYS BECAUSE IT TAKES ABOUT 3 SECONDS TO TYPE “regionfree dvd” INTO GOOGLE. YOU IDIOTS.

sincerely,
–sabrina.

computers, films, idiots, letters, popular media, rants none

wow.

3 May 2007 at 18:35 Comments off

i can’t be certain, but i think that t-mobile may have outsourced their customer service to non-native English speakers:

Dear Sabrina L Downard,

Thank you for taking the time to contact T-Mobile. I understand you are inquiring if we offer any gift certificates services or something along that line, since you are considering buying a ringtone for one of your friend who has a T-Mobile account. Certainly I can imagine the importance of acquiring this information, as you are planning to gift the ringtone to one of your friend and I can appreciate the importance of having this addressed in a timely manner.

My name is … and I am very pleased that you provided me the opportunity to assist you today.

Sabrina, I understand you query and after doing a thorough research on this topic, I am extremely sorry to inform you that currently T-Mobile does not have this sort of service available. However, to be honest with you I believe this is a great Idea. Here at T-Mobile we value your ideas and we will certainly try our best to have this service available in the near future.

So that this suggestion can be taken into consideration Sabrina, I have filed a Voice ticket and sent it the appropriate group of people. However, we cannot guarantee that this service will be available in the future, but it is definitely something we can hope for. We really appreciate your patience and understanding in this matter. I apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.

T-Mobile has GSM technology, which is the most widely deployed digital standard in the World. We were the first provider to offer GSM service in the US, so we have had more years to fine-tune our technology to meet our customer needs.

If you have any questions or concerns remaining, please reply to this e-mail with additional information, or contact us while in the USA by phone by dialing 1-800-937-8997 or just simply dial 611 on your handset.

Sabrina, thank you for choosing T-Mobile. We appreciate and value your time and effort in contacting us.

Sincerely…

etc none

iConsume!

27 April 2007 at 21:49 Comments off

so my poor baby laptop, which i love to little tiny pieces, is getting old and crotchety. it’s had some problems. it lost a fan, so it gets really warm. its dvd drive started flaking about two years ago, and a couple of months ago it finally died. its hard disk is both slow (4200 rpms) and tiny (60 GB). it gets hot, and it’s only got a gig of ram, and i can only run a couple of fat applications simultaneously — if i have both firefox and safari open (as i often do), i can just forget about running quicktime player without the fan kicking on. nonetheless, i’ve had this laptop for ages, it’s an original 17″ powerbook G4 and i literally ordered it the day it was announced at MacWorld, and it’s been such a good computer, which is why i’m tremendously sad to announce that it’s dying.

a fan i could replace, a hard disk i could upgrade, and a dvd-rom i could fix (none of those cheaply, which is why i’ve been putting them off for ages, but technically fixable)… but now it’s got a hosed up USB port that appears to have fried a USB hub, and that’s on the logic board, and *that* basically is the computer. so that leaves, like, the keyboard, power adapter, and display working well.

i love my poor little baby laptop. she’s been so good to me. :( i’m so sad!

Bestickered laptop

nonetheless, i am a pragmatist. i understand that a dying laptop is not much good for using for doing computery things, and that is why i just — sigh — dropped $1800 on a new iMac at the Apple Store. i think i saved a whole $50 with my student discount. hooray.

  • iMac 17-inch, Intel Core 2 Duo
    • SuperDrive 8X (DVD+R DL/DVD±RW/CD-RW)
    • 2GB 667 DDR2 SDRAM – 2x1GB
    • 250GB Serial ATA drive
    • 2.16GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
    • Ships by: Apr 30 – May 2
    • Delivers by: May 1 – May 3
  • Canon PIXMA MP460 Photo All-in-One Printer
    • Ships by: Apr 27 – Apr 30
    • Delivers by: Apr 30 – May 1

(the only reason there’s a printer on there is because it was $110 with a $100 rebate, and my old printer driver — which works only grudgingly under panther — does not work at all with tiger so far as i can tell. at least the new one is smaller. probably quieter, too.)

i guess i’ll freecycle the old printer. my ancient G4 quicksilver, Nigel, i might as well just freecycle, if anyone’ll even take it. it takes up so much room and i never use it anyways — no point; shiny’s much faster than it, and it’s crashy. at least this is an excuse to clean some stuff out of the office, i guess.

i’m just so sad poor shiny is dying. i know i shouldn’t anthropomorphize my computers, but i do anyways. all my computers i work with most frequently have personalities, so i pat them and tell them to cheer up when they’re grumpy. i used to always go into the machine room at U of C and pat plaisance and tell her things like “we have some nice new memory for you, sweetie.” (plaisance was my little baby Sun Fire 6800. i think i was the only one who liked her…she was kind of whiny and crashy. it wasn’t her fault, though; she was a Rev 1.) i also pat my cars and call them good girls. honestly… it’s not so much anthropomorphization as it is sort of canispomorphization: i talk to inanimate objects like they’re pet dogs. anyways. point is, i’m sad my favorite little laptop is dying. i expect that by the time the boxes show up at my door i will be excited, but for now, i’m mostly just mourning.

i am handling the finances like so: i signed up for the promotional credit, the Juniper Apple Visa with iTunes Rewards. hey, i just spent $1800 on a new mac; the least they can do is give me a damn $25 iTunes gift card. :P at least this way it doesn’t interfere with my plans for repaying the other cards, and i get three months to whittle it down before there’s a finance charge. so. it ain’t great, but insofar as spending $1800 unexpectedly goes, this is probably not the worst way i could have handled it. (probably not the best either, but at least i did put some thought into it…) it was exactly the “good enough” solution for this (and any other solution would have gotten me mired in worry and anxiety, and that’s no good). and, best of all: this will give me a new Visa card so i won’t have to give Chase any more money (since my current/only Visa is through them), because they are bastards and we hateses them, preciouss. hah, take that, JP Morgan Chase Bank NA! i vote with my credit line…and also my dying computers, apparently.

that said… just, i better not have any unexpected $1000+ purchases for a long while, man. :)

chez niqui, computers, emo bullshit, finances, hobbies none
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