As I am bored and have neglected Livejornal for far too long, here's an update on Life:

I bought a bunch of shiny new toys for my birthday back in February.

Item the first: Toshiba M7-7331 Tablet PC (aka Helmholz).  I had my eye on this model after reading several stellar reviews.  I really wanted a model that packed a lot of firepower and a nice big, hi-res screen.  Unfortunately, it had been out of my price range all the way up to when Toshiba stopped selling it.  Newegg came to the rescue, and even sold it to me for 300 bucks less than Toshiba would have (plus I didn't have to pay tax or shipping).

What I've discovered: Dual-core processors are nice.  Very nice.  The thing has a processor speed roughly half that of my beloved PC Roy and the same amount of RAM, but can run disk-scanning software like MightyMax or McAfee roughly 20 times as fast.  Helmholz (I wanted to name him Riza II, but it just didn't seem to fit) runs anything I've thrown at it with a lot of style and barely a whirr from the fan.  His screen has a HUGE range of brightness settings, which I love because sometimes I'll be using him in a dark room, and sometimes he needs to be under lecture lights.  He is also remarkably cool temperature-wise.  I can hold him in my lap for extended periods and not even feel warm.  His battery life on the low-light setting is almost 4 1/2 hours, too.

The tablet function itself is pretty good.  I use Helmholz pretty much exclusively to take notes in class now...I was nervous about One Note at first, but it turns out to be pretty handy once I beat it into submission.  The pen has a good sensitivity range, although the software on that end isn't very in-depth.  It also tends to lag a bit, especially in CPU-hogging programs like Photoshop CS. If I'd wanted the thing only for art I would have bought one of those Wacom monstrosities.

The wide screen is a 50/50 for me.  I don't like that there are hardly any wallpapers I can find that fit, and it adds bulk to the computer itself.  It's also kind of a pain trying to reach all corners when it's sitting on one of those tiny arm-desk thingies in the lecture halls.  But  the resolution is awesome and movies look great on it...plus I can pile more windows than I can on a 4:3.

Item the next: Toshiba Gigabeat S60 (aka Black Hayate II): I've been massively unwilling to fall in with the iPod crowd.  I kind of wanted a Zune, but they're pricy.  I finally settled for the Toshiba imitator, which also runs Windows Mobile, has a radio, can play video of all varieties, recorded TV, picture slideshows and is a wee bit better proportioned than the iPod in my opinion.

The little screen on this thing is impressive.  I can read the subtitles on my fansubs, even.  (WMP can convert other video format to its own upon transfer.)  It also does album art--which is another story for later in this post.  The menu is intuitive and easy to navigate, and it scrolls fast, thank Jebus.

A few complaints: Hayate has a tendancy to randomly "forget" files.  It happens mainly when the battery gets low, but someties just randomly.  It's not a HUGE deal to plug it in overnight and re-sync, and fortunately I've never had it happen in the middle of me listening to something.  The other thing is, the screen draws a lot of battery power, so if I'm flipping through songs it can drain the power pretty fast on what might otherwise be 24 hours or so of life.  The battery can also drain slowly over time if it isn't switched off (as opposed to being under hold).  The adapter that comes with it is almost as big as the one for my laptop...almost bigger, in fact, than the player itself.

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So once I finally got this 60 gig music player, I had to figure out how to fit all 31 gigs of my music onto it.  That sounds like a fairly simple task, except for this: previous to, say, March of '07, my media information was pretty much solely contained in the filenames.  Now, I knew that Windows has better ways to deal with all the information you could ever possibly want to know about a song, but I just hadn't bothered.  I liked my system.

Except that by my system it would have been impossible to open an album on Hayate and actually get all the songs, in order.  I spent roughly 3 12-hour days going through my albums, looking up info when I could, ordering tracks, consolidating artist/album names, standardizing genres, etc.  I'm still not done, but I'm done enough for the next few months...plus, it's to the point where I can at least update my files on Hayate without major breakdown or massive amounts of erasing and recopying.  Mostly what I'm missing now is album art.

The main program I was using to sync my Gigabeat was, of course, Windows Media Player 10.  WMP has many redeeming features, but its acceptance toward non-sanctioned tag information is not one of them.  It was really bugging me that I had no album art for my Ayumi Hamasaki albums, so I put some images in the tag via WMP.  Still didn't show up on Hayate.  I found a blog post that explained that WMP will only "embed" album art in a tag if is is industry-provided, meaning you have to use their album info service.  Not only is the service horribly inaccurate, it's also no surprise they don't have much for Ayu.  The blogger recommended an alternative program, called Media Monkey.

Oh my god I love it.  Media Monkey is WMP on steroids.  Well, maybe not steroids.  More like speed.  It's smart and it's got an archiving system about 3,000 times better than WMPs.  It will let me embed my album art, AND sync it to my gigabeat.  For some reason, it can see songs in Roy's My Music folder that WMP can't, which is nice.  It also syncs faster than WMP.  I'm almost tempted to completely uninstall WMP, if I didn't think I might use it for *something* in the future.  So, for any of you people looking for good library/player software: Media Monkey.  It's free, and has no spyware or adware attached.  Try it.

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For the last story, I invite you to consider lab classes.  Probably the last lab class some of you kids had was in high school.  Us Chemical Engineers aren't so lucky (although, admittedly, I know other breeds of engineer who have it worse).  I have a four-hour lab class that meets every week.  Our projecs involve not only taking data, but also susting out the way the given equipment works, how to design the experiment, what equations we'll need.

We don't get to choose our lab partners, either.  I'm stuck with a guy who doesn't speak English very well (not his fault, I'm sure, but annoying nonetheless) and a guy who doesn't seem to understand that he comes off as enormously arrogant, understands little about the things we're doing, can't proofread, edit or follow instructions worth a damn, and in general has an annoying personality.

Our experiment involves determining how fucked up a set of pipes are.  We don't get to saw the pipes in half, nor do we even get anything handy like, say, an actual manometer.  We get a pump, four rusy pipes, fourteen thousand valves, a big thing full of really gross rusty water and a little digital readout that hasn't been calibrated since Caesar was assassinated.

We wasted a lot of time in lab taking down incorrect or inaccurate numbers, and having the wrong impression about what data we needed.  Part of this was our TA's fault, as he wasn't familiar with the setup and kept feeding us bad ideas and messing around with our equipment.  Part of the bad data was due to us not getting the experiment or how to corellate all the information we got from this one tiny little amp meter.  Partial closure on this end was simply taking a bucket, filling it with discharge water from the pipes and carting it back and forth to this ancient spring scale.  Even then, we didn't do it enough times to get a good curve.

Furthermore, I've spent literally days crunching numbers for our data...more often than not, the error I'd made was a simple matter of dividing by 12 instead of 12^2 or other stupid things.  The reason I didn't catch them is basically: spreadsheets are big and confusing, and moderately evil.  Good news: I got things to work, and our numbers have correllation if not any bearing to reality.  Bad news: I severely want to kill Excel and at least one of my lab partners.  And I have 7 more weeks of this crap...oh, and also a presentation on all the stuff we *supposedly* did next week.


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In other news, I'm out of money for the month.  Both my primary pairs of jeans developed sympathetic thigh holes and needed to be replaced.  The style I like was on sale at the JC Pennys website, but they didn't have any in my size.  So I paid 20 bucks more to order directly from Levis.

I spent roughly the same amount of money on a pair of shoes, which I stress is not something I normally do.  I wore my Adidas flip-flops to class one extraordinarily warm day, which turned out to be a huge mistake because those little nubs cause SERIOUS pain when walked on with any force.  Great for the shower, shit for, you know, anything else.  Long story short, I decided I needed a decent pair of waterproof sandals.

The Wooly Mammoth, a shoe store on the Ave, had two brands that I liked: Teva and Chaco.  Tevas are fairly inexpensive, and great for things like the beach, but not wonderful to walk around in all day.  The Chacos, on the other hand, were pricy, but have excellent arch support and a lifetime warrantee--Chaco wil even re-sole them if they get worn.  My engineering mind was also fascinated by the one-strap design, wereas you have to pull on the straps in about 5 places to adjust them completely, because they're all interconnected underneath the upper sole. 

Naturally, I spent 90 bucks on the Chacos.

I found a complete copy of Blavatsky's The Secret Doctrine at the used book store for 8 bucks--score.

I spent the last dwindling amount of my money last Saturday at the zoo.  Sally and I had lunch there (7 bucks for a hot dog and a bottle of water) and wandered around cooing at the salamanders, giraffes, gorillas and orangutans.  The orangutans were especially fun, because there was a zoo employee there drawing a portrait of one of them.  The ape sat at the window, watching her play with her grease pencils and ink and looking fascinated.  From my angle at the scene, I got a really cool picture (on my phone, alas) of the woman's face's reflection superimposed on the orangutan's:


Well, that's it, I'm out.