Song of the day: Dear Alice - Vibes

So, first of all, who invented morning dentist appointments? Because I was already done with my appointment at 8:30, when normally I'd just be having breakfast then! Argh. And it's been a long time since I've blogged! But it's finals season, so crap is picking up--besides the fact that I'm a college student so I don't often have a tonne of free time. (And that's as a liberal arts major--my heart bleeds for all my premed/nursing friends!! One told me she has to average 16 or 17 a semester to do nursing in four years. Yikes!!!) I feel like I always say I should update more, but I think part of my constantly saying that is holding myself to the standard I held myself to back when I started this site in ninth grade and to some extent into my sophomore year. Back then, I was able to coast along while working on my site in the back of the class--sadly, that time is no more, at least if I want to keep getting As instead of Bs or Cs.

But I want to keep working on the site in the long run--I don't often think about how proud I am of this site, but I am rather proud of it. I started this coming up on five years ago, and I've been working on this continuously for almost four years now, so this is the result of years and years of work on my part. Who knows--I may at some point take a little break from webmistressing (I'm basically already forced to do so) but I think in the long run, this site is going to be one of my interests that keeps springing back up again and again, especially as I slowly old tech-ify my life--like a little experiment I'm currently trying at school to get by through as much as I can without a laptop. More on that to come, if God willing I can keep on it.

Besides that, I've realized recently just how social college has made me. I mean, before, as long as I was eating lunch, etc., with my best friends and IMing them on the weekends, I felt socially satisfied, but now being at home for Thanksgiving break and not really having anyone to hang out with or get meals with has been super weird and kind of uncomfortable, to be honest! But then on second thought, maybe it's just because I was with the same group of people all the time without having to try in highschool, whereas now, I have to seek social interaction out and spend more of each day alone. I don't know, but I do look forward to when my classes have a lot of the same people in them so I can have more consistent bonds.

I had yet another freaking exam in compsci last week, and my customary visit to strop central on the phone with my mum the night before. What the heck is with that, by the way? Why do they still terrify me? It's nearly the end of the semester, and anyhow I've already had like four major assessments or something? You know it's bad because I've lost count. But anyways, I at least got an A, thank God! But so far this break I've had to write a French essay and finish my last week's computer science lab, and I still have to do a lot of work for my public speaking speech, PLUS the fact that I have to, y'know, do Thanksgiving with two sides of the family on two different days. Oy vey!

For one side, I'm baking my other side's famous mac and cheese, which absolutely disgusted my little cousins last year because there were (THE HORROR!) BREADCRUMBS on top. God willing, their palates will have diversified a little more since last year. And I may have accidentally-on-purpose volunteered myself to make some Tollhouse cookies for that side too, with a secret ingredient of maple syrup, just because it sounds like it could be good and I've never tried it. So there goes another chunk of time, too. Now, I may be wrong, but I thought this was supposed to be a break...? At least I get hella winter break, thank God!

But honestly, I've just been spending this break mostly doing homework and kind of surfing the Web, reading and watching Netflix as well. I'm also trying to bring my pink HP netbook into use, even though I have no clue how that's going to go with my whole no-laptop thing---I still have to figure that out, and also I have to write about the last however many days. Argh! I just really need a break tomorrow, you know? But yeah, that's about it for this time. I'd like to blog more frequently, so I'll try to do that---let alone updating the rest of my site! I need to make a site to-do list, but I digress. Toodles!

Published on Monday, November 25, 2024, at 9:19 PM.

Song of the day: Dear Alice - Vibes

Hello everyone---after about an age, it is I! I'm oddly free this weekend, but recently I've been uber busy, so I haven't had time to work on the site at all. But, thank God, I have a week of Thanksgiving break coming up where I should have free time, and after that a month of Christmas holiday!! But this week has been especially crammed from the reason for this particular blog post---the computer I'm currently writing this on. I'm sure I mentioned them on here at the time, but in case I didn't, over the summer my mum found me two super-early Intel iMacs for free from some people down the road from us! One's a 17-inch and the other's a 20-inch model. They're even both early enough that they have the white plastic design instead of aluminium!

They were cool and all, I didn't really know what to do with them at first, so they stayed at home when I came down here for college. That is, until recently, when I suddenly got really nostalgic for Windows XP. My mum came up the next weekend to spend the day with me, and I had her bring me the 17-incher and a few blank CDs and DVDs, because I had a scheme forming... After she left that evening, I booted this puppy up and found a couple of surprises. Firstly, I found out that my college's IT department must have quite the hospital billage for their legs, because their pants are on fire! They claimed that only OS X Mavericks and later would even connect to the Wi-Fi on campus, and only Mojave and later are supported, but I booted up into OS X Lion, which is two years older than Mavericks and seven years older than Mojave, and it works like a charm! They also claim it only works on 5GHZ, not 2.4GHZ, but I doubt this bottom-of-the-line iMac from 2006 that has the graphics of a literal netbook has super-high-speed networking.

I also discovered that, although this model could officially dual-boot with XP through Boot Camp, doing so needs version 3 or older... guess what version Lion comes with? Version 4. Barf. I briefly considered 7 instead, even though I knew it would probably crawl on this computer's graphics, at least compared to XP, but then I decided to keep on trying. So soon enough, I was downloading a Windows XP ISO and burning myself an install CD! That part went smoothly. However, when it came time to find an OS X ISO to burn a copy of OS X Leopard for the drivers (because of course I couldn't just automatically download them like the new versions of boot camp do) I kept getting failed downloads. And time-out errors. And download speeds from the Internet Archive, God bless them, that meant it would've literally taken weeks for some of those downlads. Uh, yeah, no. And when I finally did download the ISO, it was big enough it needed a dual-layer DVD. Guess what I don't have??

Thankfully, however, I did end up finding someone who had just uploaded the driver portion of the ISO to the Internet Archive, and I had a genius idea: couldn't I just mount the ISO in Windows to get the drivers? So that's what I did, and thank God, it worked! So far there had been much less friction than when I had installed Windows 7 on my HP desktop. But wait---there's more!

I ended up spending almost all of my free time that week setting it up, getting it how I like it, etc., and of course there was one thing (No, One Direction, I'm not talking about you) that bugged me. This was an XP-era machine, and Minecraft came out toward the end of the XP era, so surely I should easily be able to get Minecraft running on this computer, right? Well, uh...

I failed to realize when I thought of this that, according to Wikipedia, this was the very bottom-of-the-line model of its refresh crop, with not just integrated graphics, but mobile integrated graphics which apparently were common in netbooks at the time. Why the hockey stick Apple thought that was okay to put in a proper desktop computer, I'll never know, but they did. I downloaded MultiMC and signed in without a hitch, and then I started up Minecraft. I was so excited when it was loading, my anticipation mounting... only to be destroyed when I was informed that I didn't have sufficient OpenGL support. What the bollock? So I went on another Great Driver Hunt, and couldn't find any updated drivers for this graphics card. Heck, I was already using the latest version Apple ever released for XP on their end. So what next?

Well, I decided to try another launcher, because apparently that had worked for someone on-line. So I tried Betacraft, only to be unable to sign-in. More research. Apparently, I didn't have a new enough version of Java installed. ARGH. So I tried to install that, but I had to do I don't even remember what to get that to work right---something about a missing dll or something. And when I finally got that working, it still wouldn't work right because I, very stupidly, hadn't clicked the "uninstall older version of Java" button. So I tried to use Windows's uninstaller. Didn't work because "The Windows Installer Service could not be accessed". So I had to learn what on Earth that is, and then restart it and the computer, and it FINALLY worked, so I FINALLY signed into Betacraft, only to be told, once again, that I didn't have the proper OpenGL capabilities to run Minecraft.

%$#7&%!!!!!!!

So, back to scouring. I nearly installed shady patched drivers, but then decided that should be a last resort. Instead, I ended up turning down the level of OpenGL acceleration in the control panel, which... worked?!? All this time I 've just done that? Okay. Well, Minecraft didn't run so quickly, but it ran nonetheless! Although I had to keep the fog very close. I think I had to do the same on my Windows 7 PC before I installed Optifine, so it's not too out of the ordinary. Maybe I should try installing Optifine again...

And of course, being picky as I am, I'm still not fully done getting it how I like it. This was my first mostly homework-free weekend in a long time, and I still spent a good couple of hours downloading and installing and configuring Thunderbird, LibreOffice, etc., etc... I really need to call it quits! At least I finally got some time today to blog here and work on my good old Web-site. Now, I know I say this a lot, but I promise to work on the site more soon! I have fall break coming up, and then my Christmas holiday after that, so I'll have plenty of time to get around to some projects I've been wanting to do on here! More details to come...

But right. That's the end of a novel of a blog post, and now I'm off to surf the Net some more before I have to teach tonight. I'll talk to all y'all again later---toodles! :)

(By the way, y'all, Dear Alice, SM Entertainment's British boygroup, finally released the soundtrack to their TV show! I love all the songs---I'm so excited for their career! :D)

Published on Sunday, November 10, 2024, at 3:42 PM.