Saturday, 23rd of March, 2002
I went out and bought a Logitech WingMan Formula GP USB wheel today, as my $5 joystick has been beat to death, and the only games I play are driving games anyways, so this is most useful.
Wednesday, 20th of March, 2002
In orchestra rehearsal today, there was a draft...
Friday, 15th of March, 2002
We had our St. Louis Youth Symphony evening concert for the season tonight. We played Brahms' Tragic Overture, Copland's Lincoln Portrait, and Sibelius' 2nd Symphony. The Brahms has definitely grown on me since we started practicing it, and the Sibelius is just awesome, my favourite parts are the 3rd and 4th movements.
Thursday, 14th of March, 2002
I went to Parkway North's production of My Fair Lady tonight. It was pretty cool, I liked the set a whole lot, and the push-out study setting was particularly unique and interesting. It's a really long musical, they did the whole thing, and it was very well done.
We musicians know we can put tuning forks up to a desk and it will produce more noise, and now they have a speaker that basically works like that. The Soundbug turns flat surfaces into speakers.
Monday, 11th of March, 2002
Oh wow, my profile on my Windows 2000 Pro machine definitely got corrupted today. It's only now that I realize it's 400MB! That's insane! There can't be possibly anything in here that I need that takes up that much space. So I took a blank profile, fooled it into thinking it was my account, then copied over Desktop, Start Menu, Favorites, and ntuser.dat. There! Problem solved. After further investigation, I'm seeing that 336MB of this is in the TEMP folder. Gee.
Thursday, 7th of March, 2002
After an unsuccessful attempt at washing my car by simply rinsing it, I decided it needs a real car wash, cause all the road ice gunk that's left from the last snow is definitely still on there. So I sent it through the car wash. This is a beginning of a long adventure of my engine having problems in water. The car definitely goes into a bucking action when I give it any more than 1/4 gas, and then it slowely clears up after things have dried. Looking under the hood, I immediately see some of the vaccuum hoses are loose, but reconnecting them didn't solve anything in the future.
Wednesday, 6th of March, 2002
Joe and I rented Ronin, and the car chases are definitely awesome! Just the fact that it's European makes it a lot better than any chase scene in American-set movies like the Fast and the Furious. The exhaust notes of those cars were really nice and beefy too, and the narrow streets, handbrake turns, all that stuff. I like it! The plot was really ridiculous though, hard to see what the motive of anything was, but that's ok.
Monday, 5th of March, 2002
Alright, so it's Spring Break, and I have time to think about things like my phone. I've decided it's not worthing the $40 I spent on the vibe module for my Ericsson, since it only works half the time, and not to mention everything on the Ericsson is made out of plastic, and the way I use my phone, that's useless. The wall charger has already broken where it connects to the phone, and that's really to be expected, the way it'd designed. I can definitely justify spending $150 on a Nokia 3360, which is nice and small, has internal vibrating alert, gets excellent reception, and, best of all, has an infrared report that supports transfers of contacts between Palm and PocketPC PIMs, and even works as an infrared modem for a 14.4kbps connection! Cool! Now I can access the internet completely remotely on my laptop.
Saturday, 2nd of March, 2002
I went to the Super Computer Sale this morning at the Gateway Convention Center in Collinsville, IL. I've been missing out! It reminds me a lot of the permanent clusters of computer stores by the Taiwan Institute of Technology that I went to this summer. Everything was ridiculously cheap, and there was a lot of used laptops and "junk" that was very interesting. There were some really potentially worthwhile old toys, like this one $199 touch-screen P133 laptop. I was going to buy it for my car, but then I realized it didn't have a sound card, so the idea of making it an MP3 player isn't so great, not to mention a P133 won't play MP3s very well. Old systems were also very plentiful, and you could get a solid Pentium-3 450Mhz system for $300 easily. There was also a neat little thing I haven't seen before, and it was a finger-mouse, a mouse that slid on your finger and you used our thumb to control the ball. Looks awesome for presentations, and I almost felt like I should have bought it at $18 for the USB version, but I'll wait. I ended up buying only a PS/2 mouse extention cable for $3 (as opposed to the $7 that they charge at Gateway Electronics, or even $12 at CompUSA)
So as I was running about, Collinsville, then to rehearsal, and then to the stroll tonight, I saw the progressive change in weather. As I was heading to Powell from Illinois, the raindrops changed to a more solid and bouncing-off-my-windshield form, and then to huge snowflakes. It was really almost a blizzard fashion, the way it was coming down around 14:15. Then, it got cold and all the water on the ground iced over, making the most dangerous driving situation so far all year. Only some of us were able to play tonight at the stroll out at the Sheraton in Earth City, but it was a very worthwhile evening as the Lions' Club also braved the weather and found it worthwhile to attend. One of the end results of this long day of multi-weather-driving is a very dirty car.
