Technical difficulties

So I had every intention of doing a Movie Monday post today. It's sitting in drafts and everything, just waiting on a couple of images.

But my plans have been foiled by the super sucky wifi at our B&B in Waitomo, which is refusing to even load my emails on my laptop. So I'm resorting to the app and hoping like hell that it will actually work...

Basically, apart from the crap wifi, New Zealand is awesome, and this time in just over 15 hours, I'll be in Wellington with Kim, flailing all over the place with excitement.

Proper updates to follow...

K xx

Sigh.

The past week or so has been...a wee bit trying.

Last week, I had a delightful cold in which my nose was simultaneously blocked AND running constantly, and went through three boxes of tissues in as many days.

Then on Saturday, I reached for a tissue and managed to knock over my water bottle. Of course the lid was off, and the contents went all over my keyboard. Of course my computer was ON at the time, and promptly shorted out. I've been using my dad's laptop since then (thankfully, my parents are in Vietnam at the moment so I don't have to fight him for it!), but it's incredibly slow and the mouse is indescribably sensitive - pretty much any time I try to move it to the right, it decides to adjust the zoom to 90%, and it has a tendency to hover over the favourites bar and randomly take me to other pages when I'm in the middle of doing something.

So on Monday morning, I phoned a computer repair place to get a ballpark figure of how much it would cost to fix. The answer? $44 to diagnose the actual problem, and then between $270 and $350 for the actual repairs. And that was just to sort out the motherboard. The fact that the battery light doesn't come on when I plug it in makes me suspect that there's something weird going on with the battery as well. So I think it's going to be more cost effective to go and buy a new one rather than repairing it. Especially seeing as it's been nothing but trouble since day one!

Then on Monday night at about 7pm, the power suddenly went out to the entire neighbourhood. I spent a good ten minutes wandering around the house by the light of the laptop screen locating candles and matches, and the following two and a half hours sitting by the light of about twenty tealight candles struggling to read my Kindle and dying of boredom. I honestly think the worst part was that I'd been planning on thawing something from the freezer for dinner. With the microwave out of commission, I had to change my plans a little.

A small selection of the candles I had on hand

Have you ever tried to make cheese sauce in the dark? For some reason, I decided that I should make macaroni and cheese, which turned into spaghetti and cheese sauce when I discovered that we didn't have any macaroni. Yeah, it was a terrible plan. Because it turns out it's really hard to make cheese sauce when you can't see what you're doing. It was probably a good thing that the lights were out, because I'm fairly certain it looked like vomit. Or Clag. Or both. It was lumpy as hell, at any rate. Plus, it turns out it's really hard to eat spaghetti that's covered in cheese sauce, because you twirl the fork and end up with the entire bowl in one big blob.

I had a job interview yesterday that I thought went pretty well. This afternoon, I got a rejection email. When I told my cousin, who's staying for a few weeks, she immediately decided that we needed to break out the ice cream and chocolate. I am one thousand per cent okay with this plan.

In completely unrelated news, I vlogged for the first time since finishing VEDA. I think we can all agree that my editing skills have improved as a result of making a video every day for thirty one days, yes?

This is random and filled with first world problems, and kind of has no logical ending. Sorry not sorry?

K xx

Gaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah

So I was planning on writing today about all the awesome things that I have planned for my trip to the US in January. But then I came downstairs this morning, and somewhere between turning it off at 12.30am and turning it on at 8.30am, my computer shat itself. And yes, this IS the computer that I only got about three months ago because my OLD computer died a miserable death.

So after I turned into the Incredible Hulk (Hulkess? Hulkina??), and smashed ALL the things in frustration, I rang the place where I bought it. The guy on the other end was like "Yeah, it sounds like your hard drive is dead." AWESOME. On the plus side, the fact that it happened now means that the computer is still well and truly within its warranty period. On the downside, I have two assignments on the hard drive that I will now have to write from scratch. Because, you know, what you really want to do after putting in hours and hours of work is TO DO IT ALL AGAIN.

Anyway, my laptop is currently off with the good people at JB Hifi, who are attempting to recover the data and restore the factory settings to see if that fixes it before they jump through all the required hoops to send it off to Acer. Please keep your fingers crossed that the whole factory setting thing does the trick, because if not, it'll be a MINIMUM for 4-6 weeks before I get my laptop back, and that would suck.

What did I do to cheer myself up after dropping my computer at JB Hifi, you ask? Well, I hung out with the puppies at the pet shop for a while and wished I could take them all home, and then I went and bought this:

Because who DOESN'T need the Tenth Doctor's Sonic Screwdriver??

Off to reconstruct my academic future and sob quietly at regular intervals,
K xx

PS. The moral of today's story? Don't buy an Acer...
PPS. The second moral of today's story? BACK YO SHIT UP. Don't be me and back up your hard drive three times a year. Because being me ends in tears...

Technology hates me

Do you ever have one of those days where every single thing you try and do using a piece of technology goes horribly, horribly wrong?? Yesterday was one of those for me.

Things that went wrong with technology yesterday:
1. My iPod decided that it was going to skip through a hundred songs without playing any of them.
2. My laptop kept losing the internet signal at home, even though it was sitting directly over the router.
3. I got an email from Lor telling me that our next Buffy recap post was ready for my snark.
Me: Lor, I think I broke Wordpress.
Me: Lor, it won't let me add pictures.
Me: Lor, it's doing weird things.
Me: Lor, why won't it wooooooooooooooork?????? :(
Me: Lor, seriously, I think I broke Wordpress.
4. When I caught the tram to uni, I had to hold my Myki in front of the scanner for approximately a millionty years (okay, maybe more like 30 seconds) before it finally registered.
5. I had to push the button in the lift about four times before it stooped to taking me to the floor I wanted to go to.
6. The wifi at uni was broken.
7. My phone doesn't get 3G reception in the lecture theatre on the 9th floor.
8. There was a fire drill about 5 minutes into the lecture, and we had to evacuate. (Okay, that one isn't really technology related, it was just frustrating...)
9. My computer decided to shut down its wifi receiver altogether for no apparent reason.
10. Google Docs stopped working, meaning I was able to contribute absolutely nothing to our group project. And yet, when someone else looked at it, I was listed as currently viewing the document about five times.
11. I finally made Google Docs work by using Internet Explorer (*shudder*), and when I was having an "Eeeeeuw, Internet Explorer" moment to one of my friends on the way to the tram stop, I got glared at by an old man who apparently didn't approve of my language. I maintain that the baby Jesus WOULD cry if he had to use Internet Explorer, and that he would probably swear about it too.

Basically? I was on the verge of this yesterday:

Source

Oh, and Google Docs is STILL playing silly buggers. It's awesome. Except that NOT.

Does technology hate you too? Please say it does.

K xx

Things I Like Thursday, Volume 9

Seen random stuff on the internet that you find hilarious or just want to share? Head over to Gina's to link up!

So. Things are going to be a little light this week. Because (in case you've missed any of my numerous cases of whinging about it) we've gone over our internet downloads for the month, thanks to a bizarre set of circumstances involving our set top box. Yeah, I don't entirely understand it either... Anyway, we still have internet access. But it's basically dial-up speed. And it's killing me. KIIIIIIIIIILLING MEEEEEEEEEE SOOOOOOOOOOOOFTLY!!!!!

Ahem.

And yeah yeah. I know. #firstworldproblems

Anyway. Here are a couple of things that I found PRIOR to this state of tragedy descending.

First, there's this completely hilarious and completely insane exam, set as an end of year prank by an incredibly mean lecturer.

Second, there's this website, which takes the text of entire books, and turns them into completely gorgeous posters. WANT ALL THE POSTERS!

And finally, we have this, which Gina sent me LITERALLY five minutes ago (and it took that long for my computer to load the first page. Yeah. This reduced-speed-internet thing is a suckfest and a half...): a 'Hey Girl' meme site starring the one and only David Tennant. And when I have grown up internet access again (possibly when I go insane and cart my computer down to the library to make use of the free wifi!), I plan on going through the entire thing and sniggering like a total loon.

Found something online this week that you desperately need to share? Head over to Gina's and link up!

K xx

*tap tap* Is this thing on?

So I realised this morning - as I seem to somewhat sporadically these days ("Sporadic means once in a while. Try using it in a sentence" <-- name that movie) - that I have a bunch of stuff to tell you guys, none of which is really an entire post worth of stuff, meaning I never seem to get around to blogging about. So here, have a set of bullet points. Wheeeeee!!

Ahem.

• I have ONE more assignment left for the semester. It's 3,500 words, it's due in a week, and I haven't even started researching yet. Yay for procrastination?
• I finally got a new phone. It has apps and touchscreen-y-ness and doesn't hoard my text messages for days and then deliver them at 4am, which, HURRAH. On the downside, I discovered yesterday that it's really sodding hard to type using a touchscreen phone on a moving tram. So I apologise in advance for any bizarre text messages/tweets you get from me.
• My laptop gave me the blue screen of death last night. And this morning while I was trying to back everything up in case of FURTHER blue screen of death-y nonsense, it froze. So if my next post is very short and riddled with spelling mistakes, it'll be because my laptop has totally shat itself and I'm blogging from my phone. 
• If you can't find sugar at your local supermarket, it's because it was all used for Little Miss A's birthday party the other week. 

I have no idea why this is sideways. And Picasa
won't let me rotate it. Just turn your head. Like an
owl. It will be appropriate (see below)

• My BFF Char (we've now been friends for TWENTY FIVE YEARS, which is a truly terrifying concept) came over last week for an afternoon of baking shenanigans. We made chocolate chip cookie pie, English muffin bread, and an enormous mess in the kitchen. Mostly because the shortcrust pastry we made for the pie was a total fucking disaster that managed to be soggy and crumbly at the same time. I also neglected to take any photos of a) the process or b) the end products. Here's one I took of the last piece of pie, shortly before I shoved it in my face and made nomming sounds. 

It tasted better than it looks... 

• Despite the lack of photos and the disaster of a pie crust, both the bread and the pie were delicious. I shall be making both again in the future, and will hopefully remember what a camera is for at that time. 
• Char brought me a plant as part of my birthday present. If I can manage to keep it alive for a year, I'll have crossed something else off my 101 in 1001 list. Considering her instructions for its care were "Basically, ignore it", things are looking good so far!

• Contrary to appearances, I haven't forgotten about my Cookbook Challenge OR my 30 Days of Photography Challenge. I have every intention of picking both of them up again over the uni break.
• Following on from Kirsti rewatches all of Dawson's Creek and has a lot of feelings about it, I've been rewatching The X-Files in the last few weeks. I actually own season 1. ON VHS. I'll blog about it a la Dawson's Creek eventually, but for now I can say that my thoughts can mostly be summed up as "Ahahahahahaha, LOOK AT THE COMPUTERS/PHONES!!!" and "OMFG. What is Scully wearing???" Aaaaah, 1993... 
• In a week and a half, Deidre and I will be having a very special Dessert Day. It's super exciting. You should see the amount of jumping up and down with excitement that's been going on. Seriously.
• Alice, Emmy, Leah and I are planning a very nerdy "Everyone watches a particular episode of Doctor Who simultaneously" thing. It will be epic. There will be much tweeting. I will make sure this event actually happens.
• I appear to have run out of chocolate. Send help immediately.

How are things with you guys? You know, non-movie watching, non-travel from four years ago, non-random stuff I found on the internet things??

K xx

30 Days of Photography - Day 17

I picked up my shiny new replacement camera on Wednesday (wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!! Although I still don't have my 50mm prime lens because they've had to order it in - SAD FACE FOREVER), and can therefore FINALLY start up this series again! Hopefully now I'll get it finished, rather than leaving things hanging as they've been for the past however many months...

Anyway, the theme for day 17 is "technology". To be honest, I had no idea what to do for this. I mean, photos of mobile phones or modems or laptops aren't particularly exciting. So I figured I'd use this as an opportunity to show you what I spend chunks of my time doing now:

MARC coding. Fascinating, no? (For the record, this isn't actually something I coded. The records I've done are far sloppier than this, and have way less lines of data in them!)

The joys of training to become a librarian... And yes, that does make sense to me!

K xx

Bits and pieces

So I realised as I was writing my Movie Monday post yesterday that it's been a while since I gave you guys a general life update THING, because I've been distracted by writing about my past travels and posting pretty pictures that I took last year. But the more I thought about it, the more I realised that I didn't have anything to say that warranted an entire post. So here - have a pile of little bits of nonsense!!

• I'm dying of the plague sick and prone to hyperbole at the moment (URGH), and am coughing up a lung on a regular basis as a result. Apparently I sound like a seal when I cough. Awesome... Last night, I was coughing basically non-stop, so I went upstairs to check the basket of medicinal stuff for cough syrup. But all we had was a bottle of paediatric Dimetapp that's about six months past its use by date. I seriously contemplated drinking half the bottle anyway...
• I don't remember what I used to do for fun before Nikki moved to Australia and bought a mobile phone with the most hilarious predictive text/autocorrect function of all time. According to her phone, Spooks = Spoolp. Rocket science = pocket science. TARDIS = VASEIS. Stuttered = puttuesed. Tins = Thor. Soon = smoo. Flummoxed = flunonyed. 'Roast in the sun' = 'smart in the run'. Plate = slave. Needless to say, it's endlessly entertaining. (And if you know Nikki and I at all, you won't be surprised that our conversations include references to Spooks and the TARDIS!)
• I've handed in my first uni assignment, and am therefore having panic attacks about whether or not I did the right thing (it was a reflective thing, hence the stressing). Other than the stressing, uni's going well. Although the timetable is kicking my arse. 
• I've been watching far too much Dawson's Creek for my own good. It makes me feel better about my life, because at least there isn't readily available film footage of me wearing outfits like this:

You're welcome for the bonus Pacey. Also, source.

• When we were putting together a photo slideshow for my grandmother's funeral a few weeks ago, we needed to burn all the photos to a CD to take to the funeral home. Mum asked me to get one out of the top of a cupboard in the study. When I opened the cupboard, and reached for a CD, she suddenly said "DON'T KNOCK THAT BOX!!" in a really anxious voice. I was all "Um, okay. Why??" "*mumble mumble mumble*" "What?" "Because that's Domino's ashes..." Apparently when the parentals picked up his ashes all those months ago, they didn't want to upset me by discussing what to do with them. So they shoved him in the top of a cupboard with the blank CDs. It's kind of hilarious... (HI MUM!!)
• I caught up with my BFF Kat, who was in town for her sister's wedding last weekend. There was much drinking of coffee and eating of tiny cupcakes and marvelling over the fact that skinny ties are back in fashion #WHYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY
• I saw a man wearing a shirt that had a BUILT IN TIE. It started out as grosgrain ribbon around the collar, and then gradually the ribbon wasn't sewn to the front of the shirt any more, and became a tie. It was horrifying.
• I finally got around to getting my student card, and can now get discount movie tickets until 2014. SCORE! Shame I look like a shiny escaped mental patient in the picture...

What's new with you guys?

K xx

101 in 1001 #11

If you're a particularly observant individual, you may have noticed something a little different around my little corner of the internet in the last 24 hours.

After seeing a whole stack of my blog friends make the shift in the past month or so, and after reading a forum on the subject on 20SB last night, I finally took the plunge and bought my own domain name!

That's right - you can now access all your usual Kirsti randomness at melbourneonmymind.com!! I'm ridiculously excited about it. Any old bookmarks should redirect automatically, and the RSS feed should be fine too if you're subscribed through a reader. I hope. Because I have no idea how to fix that particular problem...

ANYWAY. The next episode from my trip will be up soon, so don't fret if you're desperate to hear about my American shenanigans! Have a wonderful weekend, my lovelies. Oh, and don't forget, you've got until tomorrow night to enter my giveaway!!

K xx

Chicago, part 1 of a millionty

Holy shitballs, you guys. I have SO many stories to tell you, and absolutely no idea where to start... While I was at dinner earlier, I actually made a list of all the stuff that's happened since I arrived that I want to blog about, and it's two pages long. So I'm going to go with bullet pointing some of it purely to avoid writing the longest posts in history.

• Chicago is kind of anti-escalators. I caught the train into the city from O'Hare and lugging my suitcase up a  bazillion stairs was not fun.
• Deep dish pizza takes a really freaking long time to cook. Especially when you haven't slept in 26 hours and go out in search of dinner at 8.45pm.
• Despite seeming like the healthy option at the time, broccoli has no place in/on a pizza...
• I lasted a whopping 24 hours connecting to Wifi on my phone before going to Best Buy and spending $250 on a shiny new Netbook. On the plus side, it will make blogging a lot easier! 
• Despite saying that you're only in the country for six weeks and that you'll be travelling, the serving wench person will still try to upsell you to a $900 state of the art laptop. Urm. NO...
• When you buy a prepaid mobile phone that costs $10, you get what you pay for.
• American TV seems to show nothing but Law & Order: SVU. I swear, all I've seen in the past 5 days is that, adverts and baseball.
• The collective noun for a group of jellyfish is a smack. Random, right?!
• Chicago apparently has really wide pavement cracks and hates my shoes. On my way to the pre-20SB Summit party on Friday night, the heel of one shoe got stuck in a pavement crack. When I got home hours later, I found that the end of my heel had actually been PULLED OFF. So somewhere, in the depths of central Chicago, is the end of my heel...
• I can't for the life of me master the art of walking on the right.
• I'm pretty sure that the only reason I haven't been hit by a car is because I've been ensuring someone else enters the pedestrian crossing first just in case I've looked the wrong way and someone is running the light...
• I kind of suck at map reading.

And I believe that covers things up to the pre-20SB Summit party, which was where things REALLY got interesting. So I think that's a story for another post.

How's things with you guys?

K xx

Je suis un failcake...

So I had grand plans for posting another challenge recipe tonight. But I'm not really firing on all cylinders today in the brain department - I was staring out the window of the bus on the way home, and spent two minutes wondering who would bother designing arks for carp before I realised that the sign said "CARPARK". To be fair, it was across two windows and the break was between the P and the A, so it did look a little like CARP ARK, but basically I iz speshul.

As evidenced by the fact that I sat down to dinner, tasted it, and realised I'd forgotten to add half the ingredients......... Thankfully, I was able to dump it back in the pot and add the missing ingredients without any issues, but still. It's not exactly a stumper of a recipe!

So anywho, between the being special and the fact that the Blogger photo uploader is generally being a bitch and uploading all my photos in Portrait orientation (meaning I have to go in and individually edit them into Landscape orientation), it's 10.50 and I'm still fucking about. Here's hoping that tomorrow, I'm less of a failcake and can actually get this damned recipe posted. Cos it's totally worth it, even if one of the ingredients requires a total treasure hunt to locate!

K xx

Twitter - I has it

Yes, that's right, folks. I've joined the 21st century, and now have Twitter! Who knew it was so useful for stalking celebrities networking with other bloggers and finding out what's new with cultural institutions around the world?!

I must now confess that the first person I followed was Nathan Fillion. Not only do I adore him and love everything I've seen him in (speaking of which, I'm rewatching Two Guys, a Girl and a Pizza Place at the moment. Aaaaaaaah, 1998...), but he's hilarious on Twitter.

Anywhosit, if you want, you can follow me - @melbsonmymind. (Apparently melbourneonmymind is a whopping TWO CHARACTERS too long for Twitter to cope with. *Sigh*)

K xx