Stuff

I had a dream last night that a spector from my past was out to kill me. My friends told me not to worry, she wouldn't actually, but the residents of Atwood were claiming she had already killed two of the summer math frosh. I woke up from that dream several times, but never shook it, so it kept coming back and I kept waking up.

My computer finally came back yesterday! The sound now works!! Played a little Civ II and threw a frisbe around a bit. Then played with the voice recognition feature of the Beta version of the new MS Office software that came on the computer. It was fun, but not very accurite. I'll need to work on talking more clearly if I actually want to use it. Of course, I type pretty fast, so it probably is only a cool thing, not a useful one.

Here's a question for you computer geeks out there: every time I open an Office application on the new computer it comes up with a dialog about "Installing MS Office" like it does when I use Office applications in the computer labs at school. I can cancel out of the dialog and the program works just fine. Is there any way to tell it not to try to "install" every time it opens?

My computer needs a name. Currently it is just SparkyII or "Sparky's little baby" as Josh calls it, but I want to come up with something a little more creative. Unfortunately, I am fresh out of inspiring Star Wars (or Spaceballs) droid names. I mean, first at home we had a desktop and a laptop. The desktop was (of course) C3PO and the laptop was (of course) R2D2. Then when I pulled the little old laptop out, I named it MTD (after the mini-translator droid in the young Jedi knights series). The new desktop computer for my parents a few years ago was named DotMatrix (after the droid in spaceballs). And Will's computer is Marvin (after the droid in the Hitchhickers Guide to the Galaxy). The name for my first computer was obvious, Sparky is Jaina's droid for her x-wing. But now, what do I name my new computer? Certainly there are other droids, but none I am exactly attached to. I suppose the obvious choices are Jane or Data, but I'm not sure I actually like those. Besides which, they are probably both in use on the network at school anyway.

Hey, there's finally something to do! And I get to do it in the other lab where it might not be so cold. Catch y'all later.

I'm not even the first person to hit that computer with that laser.

On one of my first days here, Shane pointed out the melty spots in the plastic where he hit that computer when he was first setting the laser. I am, however, the first person to hit the screen of that computer with this laser. Fortunately I hit it near the edge of the screen so the patch of dead pixels is off to the side and out of the way. I think I'm going to wait for Shane's help to do anything else on it just yet.