That’d be away from the city…

Natalie Imbruglia is keeping me company tonight. I owned her CD “Left of the Middle” when it first came out and loved it to death. Literally, apparently, because it subsequently became lost. I blame this on the fact that both my parents loved the CD, too, and each had it in their possession for a time.

At any rate, I lost it, missed it for the past five years, and finally decided I should just buy the damn thing again. So I did.

I need to go to the grocery store before I find myself subsisting entirely on Ramen noodles and pancakes.

Shmoke and a pancake, anyone?

I also need to finish Christmas shopping. *blush*. Rose people (even those whose addresses I collected before I left) are getting their gifts upon our return to campus. Charlotte folks, check your mail after Christmas.

Still hacking on the website. Polished off the little upload script for the Old Man (and others I think may want/need to upload files to my webspace; is there anyone who wants/needs this acess?). After fighting with upload components and fixing navigation, I’m quite done with this shit for now. Ugh. I did add some linkage to some of the newer blogs I’ve picked up and think worth passing along.

I’m thinking of posting chapters of my little story once I start revising it. I’ll probably chicken out before I do it, but the idea is bouncing around in my brain.

My roommate’s laptop was stolen last Tuesday. Apparently, it’s now on it’s way back. She’s not asking, but I am: [continue to] pursue legal action, or live and let live? Having occasionally glimpsed her torment over the past week, and being able to imagine my own distress at having my laptop stolen, I’d be a dirty bum of an idealistic dog if I quickly and immediately said, “live and let live.”

But… all’s well that end’s well, maybe. Maybe. The bloke that took it is apparently panicking; will a guilty conscience be adequate punishment? Is there a need to teach him a “lesson” by taking him to court and racking up legal fees all around? Will that make anyone feel better?

Maybe it will. I think if it were my laptop, I’d want the opportunity to be alone in a padded room with the fucker guy for about five to ten minutes to work out my frustrations, then I’d want to reserve the right to make and post a poster with his mug shot on it and the words “Dumbass who can’t check the ownership of the laptop he stole for five days” under it.

Then I’d be done. I think.

But I probably wouldn’t (couldn’t, in the case of the padded room) do that, so instead I’d go on lots of runs and lots of long walks out in the cold and rant at my friends a lot and all of those other “a lots” that help me relieve stress with minimal damage to anyone other than myself.

Sticky situation, though. I wait with bated breath for the results.

Update: following the thread, the roommate’s boyfriend is out for blood, and people are trés suspicious of the bloke’s excuse of a practical joke. Honestly, I hadn’t even thought to be suspicious of the “practical joke” line of reasoning, but thier suspicions are reasonable…

Had a dream
Had a drowning dream I was in a river of pain
Only difference this time
I wasn’t calling out your name, yeah
Has it ended before it’s begun
You hold on
And I try to run but
Anybody heading in my direction
Away from the city
Anybody wanna change the way they feel
step inside
Doesn’t really matter where you wanna take me
Away from the city
I wanna start again
I wanna start again
I wanna take it back
I wanna start again (more…)

[Listening to: City – Natalie Imbruglia – Left of the Middle (4:34)]

So I’m in the parents’ new apartment. It’s a very nice apartment: looks expensive, and folks in this part of the city drive expensive cars. Life goals achieved, right?

I wore my new “I love c_ck” t-shirt (courtesy of Dr. 7, Luke, and Bob; I hate to write that phrase on my website… *cringe* I can only imagine the search hits) home, and my father’s reaction was funnier than my mother’s. She suggested we find another one and buy it for my auntie; my Old Man made all sorts of Old Man faces and frowns.

I spent my first three hours attempting to get myself some Internet (and fixing theirs in the process). This included hunting through every damn box packed from my room (labeled “office”, interestingly enough) until I found a wireless router with which to split their DSL connection. After a bit of hackery to obtain the router’s admin password, I slapped a WEP key on that bitch and had the whole family surfing in no time.

I swear, I think they save these problems just for me. Like blinking VCR lights.

Hmm. Then there was much food (Old Man treated us to Olive Garden).

I think I’m misremembering the order of events… It’s late; I’m allowed.

Then came more computer fun. Yanked my old and big and beautiful ViewSonic PF790 monitor out of a box and hooked that shit up to my laptop–high-res, but big bold fonts and high refresh rate. Mad programming sessions, here I come.

Couldn’t find a USB keyboard or a USB wireless unit for the four wireless keyboards we have lying around (literally, and all in my damn closet), so I have the weirdest (and highly uncomfortable) setup: typing on my laptop (whose screen is off), mousing on my laptop, twisted to look at the big monitor on my left. Touch-typing gets difficult in these situations…

After more food (Arby’s just isn’t the same without my guys…) came some website fun, which is going to be my project for the next day or two. Well, screw that: sleep is my main project for the next day or two, but in the time slots around that and mad amounts of eating, I’ll be brushing up on this here domain, my Rose site, and the NSBE site.

In that order. Question my priorities not.

At any rate, commenting here should be fixed. Hopefully. We’ll see if I start getting comments that I don’t get e-mails for. Report errors, folks! Holy hell, I have no damn idea how long that error was sitting there, and nobody said a damn thing…

There are and will be inconsistencies in site navigation until I whittle away and add all I need to. Links will appear and disappear.

Yay for editing live content. Anyone who was randomly watching the photo gallery got quite a show this evening.

Speaking of which, the photo gallery is pretty much presentable in Firefox, ugly as fuck in IE (grr). I had to hack the shit out the code, unfortunately, to get a style that I liked, because the original code uses frames and that broke me. Actually, it was more like I hacked the shit out the code thinking I needed to, then I spent the next two hours piecing it back together when I decided I could make the original work with something close enough to my style to make me happy. Main site navigation disappears once you get into the actual picture sets, but I tried to improve it by including a link back to the main gallery page. Eh.

The photo that appears on the front page of the photo gallery is going to be my stock photo when anyone asks what I look like. It’s already my profile picture on The Face Book, and I’ve been told it represents the “inner Lissa” (Javid’s words, if memory serves).

Oh, and Ivan released version 2.5 of the photo catalog[ue] recently. Trés sexy.

I also made a couple of collections in the gallery for older sets of pictures, including the last Thorn night of the 2003-2004 school year. Nostalgia hit me surprisingly hard looking at those…

Metasun released a new version of Metatraffic quite some time ago that I finally upgraded to; add some database compacting, and I’m set there.

Next up: internals of site navigation, making my father’s upload script prettier, playing with robots.txt, maybe a color change. And I have three “poke, poke” e-mails to respond to in light of my last post: tomorrow, I promise. First order of business once I regain consciousness.

[Listening to: Leave Me Alone – Natalie Imbruglia – Left of the Middle (4:23)]

Now.

My plans for the next two weeks?

First up is a redesign of the data structures I’m using in my UV/VIS program (the first practical use of my soul-sucking Fundamentals III course), as well as working in the other models we need to fit data to.

Reading as many of my Contemporary Latin American assignments (with good notes, etc.) as I possibly can.

Writing my Fundamentals programming assignment.

DISCO homework and remedial work. Maybe the Old Man can help, because holy hell if I’m not getting desperate here… My lack of knowledge has expanded from not being able to count to not being able to do proofs by induction (based on assignments from Fundamentals) and to not being able to deal with relations (which I slept through and failed on my DISCO I exam and never really made up for).

Maybe a trip down to Louisville, should Luke and I find ourselves bored enough to desire each other’s company for a day. Or if I wail about my family enough and the both of us can extract ourselves from home lives and I can get the car for a day.

(I’m thinking in Boolean expressions and looping constructs again… Yay for a programming class!)

Revamping this website. I’m way behind on maintainance, and it shows. Maybe a redesign if I’m feeling creative in a colorful way (rather than a literary way).

Another 10k words on my little story.

Nice, long e-mail conversations with Dulin, Michael, Hannah, and whoever else initiates and wants to maintain such. I’m open, and in a dangerously curious/inquisitive mood. Bring it.

Cooking. I want to make dinner rolls (the only kind of bread I can manage) and to cook for myself for a while–I like what I cook better than I like what I can get from our cafeteria, and the effort required is not extraordinary.

Visiting my Autie Peaches and cousin V. Nuff said, there.

Maybe a trip to Paris/Lexington to see Aunt Lisa. I want to see her and Jordy and uncle G. and walk through her house remembering all the fun Jordy and I had there as kids. I want to see my sister, and see how she’s holding up with the job and the kids and life in general.

I want to sleep. I want to run. I want to stargaze, even out in the cold. I want to take time to indulge in some of my new curiosities about the development of Latin American countries (I so came up with a definition for “Progress” today that sent my professor scurrying for a pen to write it down. I win. I love humanities classes.). I want to read gender issues-related papers.

Two weeks of leisure time, all dedicated to recouperating and getting ahead enough to make the next eight weeks of school possible with the jobs and the activities and the workload and the biological need for sleep.

And I guess I should buy Christmas presents at some point… Yeah, so those are going to be late…

[Listening to: Down and Out – Cam’ron, Kanye West & Syleena Johnson – Purple Haze (4:08)]

… it’s so silent… I love the study time, but fear for the rush that will come and consume me, lone HD operator, at any moment…

Boo DISCO II, yay catnaps, boo novel-reading.

Actually, just “boohiss” will suffice for this whole week.