ani ruhama

Pluto has been demoted, and is no longer considered a true planet. No longer do schoolchildren have to memorize it in their list of the planets. That’s really sorta depressing…we’ve only got 8 planets now. It feels like the world’s shrinking.

In other news, I saw a meteor shoot across the sky tonight. I’ve technically seen 3 other shooting stars in my lifetime (all of them in the last year), but they were the little streaks of white light. This was a big streak of orange fire with a long tail behind it, and it was gorgeous. Hmm, maybe it was just Pluto committing suicide in its grief.

I’m in mourning. The Sci Fi channel announced today that they are cancelling Stargate SG-1. It’ll finish out this season, and then no more SG-1 on my Sci Fi Fridays.

Perhaps I’ll consider this inspiration enough to dish out the hundreds of dollars necessary for a complete DVD set of all 10 seasons. Until I examine my bank account, and become quickly uninspired. Any donations to the Buy-Laura-SciFi Fund would be greatly appreciated.

Sweet! You can now download the latest Stargate SG-1 and Atlantis episodes on iTunes, $1.99 an episode. Now I just need Battlestar.

I just made my last trip into Alicia’s attic. My roommate’s family has kindly let me use a corner of their attic as permanent storage space over the summers and such. I just moved all my boxes out for the very last time, since next time I move somewhere I’ll be leaving the college forever. Funny thought.

If I forget where I put my car this time, remind me I put it in the upperclassman lot behind the music building. Because the dorm lot is full of people moving all their stuff into the dorms, and there’s no spots.

Tomorrow morning is my orientation at my senior practicum. I’ll be working with Child Protective Services, which will be difficult to say the least, but I’m looking forward to it. Last semester, I was at a small non-profit agency that had mostly Christians working there, and it was an very positive experience. Now, this semester will give me a valuable perspective on the “other side” of social work. You know, that side where you see people at the end of their rope, and only pray that you can bring a little bit of hope into their lives, while working in an environment that doesn’t believe Christ can offer that hope and having to work sensitively within those confines. Pray for me.

From this point on, you’ll probably see more of a balance between random posts on technology and introspective posts on myself and others and life. Since I’ve been immersed in computers all summer, I naturally talked more about them, but now that I’m doing people stuff again, I’ll talk about them too, probably. When I have the time, energy, and heart to talk about anything.

I lost my car tonight, and ended up walking in circles and more circles around our parking lot before I concluded it probably wasn’t there. But I was at a loss to remember where I did park it. (I eventually figured out it was in the Library parking lot, on the other side of campus. I think I drove it to work sometime and forgot to drive it back. But I really can’t remember when. Or why.)

We now have… *drum roll*…Facebook Badges! According to the Facebook FAQ, “A badge is a customizable clip of your Facebook profile that you can share on other web sites. You can choose what information (e.g. picture, name, birthday, mobile number etc) to show on your badge. Put one on a site and it will be automatically updated each time you update your Facebook profile. The best part is that the badge will be visible to anyone you want, even non-Facebook users! These are great for blogs, personal web pages, as a forum signature, or anywhere else you can think to post it.”

Hooray, yet another way to totally destroy the remaining shreds of privacy on the web. You can share your photo, full name, networks (including school and location), personal email, screenname, birthday, cell, websites, status updates, recent pictures, and upcoming events, visible to anyone in the world that cares to see. Maybe I’ll put in a feature request for a Social Security Number field.

In other news, Google has just added some fun toys to Google Talk, like file transfer, voicemail, and what music you’re listening to. Now I must run off to play with the new shininess.

For Windows users that want a weather program with an icon in the system tray, but are intelligent enough to avoid the blight on mankind known as Weatherbug, and dislike the cluttered and uncustomizable Weather.com program, try Weather Watcher. I’ve tried just about every other program out there, but I keep coming back to it; I’ve been using it consistently for a year now, and absolutely love it.

Weather Watcher does what it’s supposed to do, and nothing more. “Nothing more” means no advertisements or spyware. You can make the tray icon look however you want. There’s a small tooltip that appears when you hover over the icon, and you can specify what information you want to appear there. There are several different skins available (I strongly recommend “Splendid”). The program interface has only 6 main buttons: Update, Current, Hourly, Daily, Maps, and Alerts. All of them do exactly what you think they’ll do.

There’s not really any more to say. Just download it.

A community member hired me to fix their computer. It originally suffered from a virus infection, and they took it to a “technician” who proceeded to just wipe and reinstall 98. They called me after they couldn’t connect to the internet; turns out their brilliant technician forgot about the drivers. So now they have a beautiful installation of Windows 98, minus drivers for their network card, video, sound, modem, and anything else that could be vaguely useful. They have CDs for XP and 98. Of course, when I’m given the option, I install XP, and so that’s what I’m doing. On a 500 Mhz Celeron with 192 MB RAM. Because it’ll work, painfully. So I’m sitting here staring at the Windows XP installation screen, as it mocks me with the “53 minutes” left that I know will take closer to two hours.

My adventure of the week has been infecting a computer with viruses. For next week’s student worker training, I wanted to have a couple machines with malware for they to try to fix. So I spent a couple hours on the internet, pretending to be 90% of Windows users. No virus protection, no firewall, and a compulsory urge to click on every big flashing red banner that warns my computer is probably infected with spyware and I should click here to scan now. I never realized how hard it was to entirely break a computer, as I started getting so many popups and system crashes in XP that I had to boot into safe mode to keep downloading stuff. And then one of my nifty little viruses decided to break my internet connection in safe mode, so I couldn’t do anything more. At that point, I decided the computer was broken enough to serve its purpose, though it still works better than half the machines I see.