My New Laptop

Forgive the stale post title, and while you’re at it, forgive my absence. I’ve been too busy playing all the video games I missed since 2005 with my new laptop, a Lenovo Ideapad Y550. I’d compliment it, but all the pros were expected, and since I’ve created the habit of complaining on Moufflets, I figured I might as well gripe. But don’t worry, I’m not as miserable as I seem.

My first gripe is the screen. Having been spoiled by a 1680×1050 display on my old laptop, my new 1366×768 has far too few pixels. I can no longer work two windows side by side. Therefore, I having to minimize all my other windows. The problem is further compounded because Windows 7 groups all windows of the same program, so before I know it I have 20 Windows Explorer windows open, half of which are repeats of each other. But that’s my fault, I suppose.

Lenovo also left out the crucial set of media buttons (play/pause, next, etc.). Luckily, this was partly remedied by remapping some useless buttons, because who needs a button dedicated to switching to movie brightness and opening Dolby sound manager (to manage some mute subwoofer Lenovo insists is there) Instead, they installed something they call SlideNav, which is this touch-sensitive bar that you can use to select applications. While cool at first, it leaves two rather annoying white LEDs, and using it requires leaving a smudge on the glossy surface.

The USB port placement is also terrible. Never, EVER place something like USBs (although they could add another one, since 3 isn’t nearly enough) at the front end of the computer. My mice constantly gets tangled in its own wire, although I admit I ought to get a wireless one to make use of my Bluetooth. Finally, they could have added a Firewire interface. One last gripe: the proper order for ‘Ctrl’ and ‘Fn’ is’ Ctrl’ on the outside. There are standards in this world (that includes you, Apple).

Other gripes: I liked my old touchpad better (so what if this one is multi-touch), and this one seems to collect one like crazy, but maybe I notice because it’s glossy and it’s black.

Because praising stuff isn’t half as fun, you decide:

• 15.6″ WLED Display (1366×768)
• Intel Core 2 Duo P8700 2.53GHz
• 4GB DDR3 Memory
• Nvidia GT240M

The laptop also comes with a camera, so now I have proof that my brother and father do not look like me: they couldn’t log in using face recognition. =]

the Moufflet Touch

Yesterday, and we had to make silver out of lead. Just kidding. I’m taking chemistry, not alchemy. The teacher threw a whole bunch of chemicals at us and told us to make 1.00g of Ag.

This involved playing with silver nitrate (AgNO₃), and the damned stuff dissolved colorlessly into water, and since we figured bad stuff like snakes, butterflies, and bubblegum Smarties were always obnoxiously colored, this couldn’t hurt.

Now, as I discovered last night in the shower after frantically scrubbing, scraping, poking, and picking, I now have some permanent marks on my hand:

Of course, maybe there were directions on the bottle, maybe there wasn’t, but the sneaky stuff according to Wikipedia “will not produce immediate or even any side effects other than” stains. Unless you have a higher exposure, in which case you might develop argyria, where your organs turn and skin turn blue-gray, perfect if you care are Nightcrawler. At any rate, my hand is going to stay this way until I get a new layer of skin. Sometimes I wish we molted.

Whoever thinks having fingertips of precious metals is great is very wrong. King Midas learned his lesson, but at least he was able to wash his curse away in a river.

Moon Fever Breaks

Most of the time, the hits I get here on Moufflets can be seen as miserable. On a good day, I might get around 50. It went up to about a hundred during that WordPress Logo contest last month.

However, starting November 17, things started to get a little hectic, not that I didn’t mind the traffic (too bad I didn’t get AdSense or anything). All of a sudden it went BOOM! from 32 to over 300 views a day.

When it first happened, I was like “Wow, if only our economy looked like that (that’s before the drop at the end).” Then I started when I checked out the details, I was surprised to find that Twilight happened to be behind all of this. Then I was confused. I thought, there must have been some serious Twihards out there. As great as my blog is, they’d have to search pretty deep to get to my link. What’s even more interesting was that the only post I have regarding Twilight was a rather critical one. After taking a moment to flatter myself that my writing was so great, my research revealed that they were only after the Twilight poster I had on (I suppose I should be sorry for stealing hits from the site I stole the picture from), but at any rate, I took that picture using Google Images. For some reason, these people were using AOL, which I find hard to believe is still alive but for AIM.

Check out the same graph with some overlays:

If you imagine that these statistics are somehow (perhaps not) related to box office sales, you get some interesting results:

• 11/20: New Moon opens. Fans lucky enough to kill for a ticket stop looking for pictures long enough to watch the premiere.
• 11/26: Thanksgiving. Apparently, there are still some values left in this world because people actually forego picture hunting (and maybe movie watching) to spend a day with their families.
• 11/27: Day after Thanksgiving. People are sleeping off the food so they can’t do anything with Twilight (except maybe dream). Of course, nobody notices that that’s the day there’s a real new moon, as in the lack of a moon.
• 12/05: New Moon’s 15 days of fame are up. Blind Sides beats the Twilight sequel in the box office. Accordingly, picture searching drops. I guess the greater they are, the harder they fall. Not that Twilight’s great or anything.
• For some reason, views are higher on Sunday. I thought people wasted time in churches, not looking for pictures, but I digress.
• The scale goes from 128 to 256 to 384 to 512 to 640. Anyone else find this interesting?

And just for the heck of it, here’s a New Moon poster. Let’s see what happens next year. =]

Only the Prestige Matters

Hope you all had a nice Thanksgiving, with an actual turkey or without, and sorry for not posting for the last month, between work and an annoying knack of forgetting my blog topics.

Yesterday, my family paired up with my cousins’ and a stray aunt to go visit a several colleges on the way down to San Diego and back up. I warned my mom it was going to rain that day, but she didn’t heed the obvious foreshadowing.

Things got off to an ugly start, with our van’s tire pressure acting suspicious, and my uncle going deciding that we would need ice on the trip in this wintry weather, and was prepared for everything except a detailed plan and a refuel.

This is what I don’t get about college visits. We look to see if we “like the environment.” It seems to be a contest among colleges to have the most semi-modern and therefore semi-ugly buildings. It’s not like any of us are going to be architecture majors anyways. At any rate, being too lazy to get out of our cars to be able to examine the artistic merits of the buildings more closely, we resorted to driving around in circles (literally “didn’t we see this before?”) into “service parking” cul-de-sacs as my brother calls them, and having to endure of parents say “it’s your favorite” at every edifice that sported the term “science” or “medical.”

Going back to the “like the environment” thing, it’s more or less irrelevant at this point. If we’re accepted, we’ll adapt if we have to. Besides, only the prestige matters.

From what I do remember when I wasn’t sleeping, reading And Another Thing (book six of three of the Hitchhiker’s Guide series, a must read), or being annoyed by my brother’s huffing and puffing pneumatics, here’s my general opinion of things. UCSD was nice, if a bit smelly from all the eucalyptus trees and a bit confusing with its “six colleges” or whatever. But while there’s a pretty beach, at the time, it seemed only good to look at, with majestic crashing waves that make it impossible to swim in (although I did see some people trying to suicide themselves).

CalState San Diego was cramped, a bit dull, and I have to stay hopefully not a last resort because of the prefix.

UC Irvine was pretty and huge. I really like the dorms, but with names like “Harvard Court,” “Cornell Court,” and streets named “Stanford,” it has a rather sadistic habit of lowering your self-esteem by reminding you that you’re still not at top no matter where you are on campus.

Lucky Eights

For those of you in my AP US History class that need un-bullshat notes for the midterm, here they are for Chapter 8:

Chapter 8 Notes (PDF)

WordPress Logo Fun

There’s a little contest that WordPress is holding for best use of their logo. Here are my humble entries:

Van Gogh’s Starry Night: WordPress style.

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UPDATE 2009/10/23

I didn’t really expect my submission to make it to the top, but I guess it did. Vote for it here:
http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2009/10/24/vote-on-the-wordpress-logo-entries/

Thank you advance to those who voted for Starry Night. It’s nice to know that people still value true art over mass media.

<script type=”text/javascript” language=”javascript” src=”http://s3.polldaddy.com/p/2160783″></script>

Ramblings No.002

These days, bottling companies proudly state, “Now made with 50% less plastic.” While that’s great for nature, the laws of nature state that all other things being equal, you can’t keep the same quality with less material. Up until recently, I kept a spare bottle of water in my backpack, and while these bottles were now “squishy,” I didn’t expect them to spring a leak. But they did. So now I have a soggy Spanish textbook, and for the same reason books are hard to burn, they are also hard to dry. But if it’s any consolation, you can now crush a bottle with your bare hands. Quite satisfying, actually.

Now that it’s junior year, with more homework translating into more time on our asses, and no more mandatory PE to counteract this effect, many of us are going to put on the pounds. I tried to make it a goal to do a set of curl-ups and push-ups before going to sleep every night, but like New Year resolutions, they turn out hard to keep. What’s interesting about this goal is that I’m not scared of the work I need to do, or the sweat I’ll break. It’s the time. Doing ten is a piece of cake. Twenty is okay. As you go up, however, it seems to take exponentially longer and longer. Doing forty is an eternity. I can take the pain of doing a thousand, but I’m loathe to take the time. Pain is fleeting, but time even more so.