Yays!

And one more flock update…

So as I was reading through the flock error submission page one of the things it wanted to know was all the extensions you have installed.  I realized that the blogging utility had been working with all the other extensions I installed but it stopped working after I installed the allpeers p2p extension.  I uninstalled and restarted, boom, problem gone.  The blogger utility works just like before.  I then reinstalled it to see if the same thing happened.  It did.  I think I just solved that one

Thanks again Will.

Hopefully they can get it figured out so that a P2P extension can be integrated into Flock.  I personally think its a great place for such an app.

Flock Followup

While I still have not gotten the Flock blogger to work at all, I was browsing some firefox plugins today and found deepester sender, which is a blogging extension for firefox.  I was able to convert it and blog from within flock that way.  Its a quick fix I guess.

Surprsingly I got a comment from Will Pate asking me to submit my problem to the development team.  It turns out Will is also a flockstar and the community ambassador to Flock.  While I’m surprised that he actually reads my blog (wishful thinking I know) its cool that he stumbled upon it while I’m having this problem (again, probably google or something) so I’m gonna go ahead and submit it and see what happens.

Thanks Will

Finals and the End of the Semester

Last day of classes was Wednesday, and I’ve got finals coming up next week.  I’ve been doing a lot of preparing.  Typing up notes and typing up more notes.  Now I have a 10 question final to write (its a take home final) and I have to read about 30 more pages for that (its for my German folklore class) and then hand it on this coming Wednesday. 

I’ve lost such track of the days since my week ended.  I screwed up 2 different things today: 1) I was looking at the wrong list for office hours of TAs for human evolution so I could go look at some old final exams.  It turns out that I was reading the lab times intead of office hours, which I missed anyway.  2) I thought there was a review session for my lab section tonight, but that was last night and I totally thought today was Thursday.  So now I’ve missed a lab review, and other people from my class have invited me to get together with them and study but since I missed the office hours I don’t have any of the questions to bring with me…d’oh!  I fail at reading, apparently.

My week is coming to a close pretty fast actually.  I plan on finishing the take home final this weekend and studying the rest of week.  I have my 2 remaining finals for CSCL on Tuesday (for intro to cultural studies and comparative lit and science and humanities) so I get to study for those, go to the review session for human evolution in between those 2 finals, and study and for the same final later that night.  I have to turn in my written final by the end of the day. 

After all that I can come back and pack, because I leave for Syracuse at 5:30 am on Thursday the 21st.  I think I’m going to end up going to the airport around midnight, because otherwise I have to leave from Geneva’s apartment at 4 am and I don’t want to wake her up or anything since she has to work.  So I will most likely be sleeping in the terminal for a while until 5:30 am comes around.  I had asked my mom to get me a 7 am flight because the buses would be running by then, but she got the 5:30 am one because it was $100 cheaper.  I’m still not very thrilled about it, since I specifically asked her for the 7:30 flight.  Bah. 

Flock=Broken

Flock is my new social browser.  It has a really nice rss reader, photo uploader (for photobucket and flickr) and a blog editor built into it.  I’ve been using the editor because then I don’t have to browse to the url to blog.  That normally works with the shortcut ctrl+B.  So I hit that combination (multiple times) and nothing happens.  I go to tools, blog, and nothing happens.  I even reinstalled flock and just removed and added the blog again and still it doesn’t work.  I’ll have to see if this is a flock wide problem or if its just me…

Anyway, I still think flock is worth checking out, it puts all these neat things in one place!

uTorrent Problems

So I’ve been using uTorrent for a while now and lately its been a real bandwidth hog, and I couldn’t browse any websites, check email, or connect to IRC when it was running.  I could only do these things after exiting the program and repairing my internet connection.  So I took a little visit to the forums at utorrent.com and found these helpful tips:

- Disable IP resolving in the Peers tab
- Try disabling DHT (Can be found in Preferences > BitTorrent)
- Try disabling UPnP (Can be found in Preferences > Connection)
- Try lowering maximum global number of connections to 200? 100? 50? (Can be found in Preferences > BitTorrent)
- Lower net.max_halfopen to 4 (Can be found in Preferences > Advanced)
- Patched TCPIP.sys and restarted computer after patching? (Assumes you are using Windows XP w/ SP2)
- Connect your computer directly to the modem to make sure the problem is not caused by the router
- Restart your computer, modem, and router after performing any of the above

I followed all of them up to lower netmax halfopen and it worked perfectly Now I have great speed and I can use all my internet applications. Yay!

This may help you too, Gimpi.  When you get back from vacation, at least.

Apartment is getting better

So I reported the following things to the office:

1.  front 2 burners on stove didn’t work (1 know was broken, the other was missing).

2.  In the bathroom, both water handles leaked and the hot water handled got too hot to touch.

3.  No sink or countertop.

4.  The toilet leaks when refilling the tank because the plunger doesn’t fit securely.  This results in 3 things:  A) The toilet is continuously refilling itself B) loud noise and C) Me having to stick my hand in really cold water for about 5 minutes to push the plunger down securly (cleverly fixed the next time by use of a long can of shaving gel).

I am happy to say that all of these things have been fixed.  The hot water handle was fixed while the cold was replaced entirely.

The place is not as messy as it was (or at least, the clutter has been shoved into corners) but its not that neat because I don’t yet have tables or cabinets to put stuff in.  I also don’t have a desk or a base to my monitor stand, which means that my monitor is laying awkwardly on its side on my futon and I can’t sit in a comfortable position and use my computer at the same time.  I’m working on a getting desk too.  And a chair.

http://s146.photobucket.com/albums/r257/loochyj/MyApartment/

Also I’m not quite sure on my landlord status (there are 2 names TCHR, LLC and TCHR, Eischens).  Eischens is apparently a slumlord who seems to mostly rent out houses, not apartment buildings.  He didn’t pay some bills on time and was going to have his license revoked (though it turns out that this was not his fault, the court screwed up the paper work and he didn’t get the notice in time) and many of the company’s retners, this one included, received notices saying they may have to vacate if he didn’t pay.  This has been cleared up, and that is good.

In any case, I really do like the location.  Its half a block to 3 buslines, 2 blocks to 2 others, and it takes me 10 minutes to get to school now instead of 45 and a 20 minute walk.  Its a lot more convenient for me if I want to sleep later or just plain forget something.  I can easily go back and pick it up, instead of just having to make do without.

I was planning on getting Comcast cable internet but the student discount is not available now as they are absorbing all of TIme Warner’s customers and getting them all up to date.  I’m not really sure why this effects the student discount, but in the mean time I installed this neat little card in my desktop that seems to magically give me an internet connection even though there are no wires.

Right, so that’s about how things are at the moment.  I think I’m gonna get ready for bed.

Lots to do

So the end of the semester is coming up rather quickly.  Things I have to do: 

1. Read 19 more folk tales from the Brothers Grimm, choose a topic, and write a 10 page paper on by the 13th.

2.  Go drink and have fun on…Sunday(?) the 10th, my birthday.  Hmm all of a sudden I’m not sure how well that’s gonna go.  I’m sure lots of places will be open on Sunday.  At any rate, at least I have Monday off.  This will also be the weekend I do lots of work on my paper. 

3.  Study study study.  I have a final for human evolution, on TV, intro to science and humanities (CSCL 1001…cultural studies and comp lit), science and humanities, and German folklore (final will be a written paper due by the last day of the semester (December 20th). 

4. Pack my stuff and go home.  I have a flight out of Minneapolis to Syracuse that leaves at 5:30 am.  I asked my mom NOT to book this flight but it apparently saved $100.  This means that I will most likely end up staying at a friend’s apartment who lives 2 blocks from the light rail so I can get up at 3:30 and go catch the train to the airport.  Otherwise I take a bus to the train around 1 am and hang out there for like, 4 hours.  I could I guess…there are people at Budget at that time (unless they’ve put the closing time back to 1 instead of 2…

So I feel like I’m gonna be busy, but looking at this list it doesn’t really seem all that bad.  I’ll see I guess.

Time for bed now.

The Move

So I moved into my new apartment on Friday. It feels good to have my very own place now. Things definitely didn’t go according to plan though. First , I arranged to borrow my roommate’s car to move all my stuff. This went fine. I dropped him off at work, picked up Kat from where she was staying and dropped her off on campus, and went back to pack. Then (9:30 am), I went to pick up the key after picking Kat up, and it didn’t work so I had to go back for a new one. This key also did not work. Then I went back a 3rd time to the office (at 11 am) to find that they were closed until 3 pm. This was a major kink. So to offset this time we both went to Ikea and Wal-Mart and did some key shopping. Did I mention I first had to unpack everything I had put in the car the first time when I had expected to bring it all in the apartment? Anyway… at Ikea I bought 2 frying pans, some floor mats and a collapsible clothes hamper. At Wal-Mart I got my futon, some towels and bedding.

After Wal-Mart it was time to come back and get the key. I went into the office and asked if they could send someone with just in case this key too did not work, to which they responded that someone was working on the place and had it open already. So I tried the door. Still locked. Finally I get back and they give me a key, and it turns out that they had copied and given me the wrong key…3 times. Yeah. So we finally manage to get into the apartment and I get another surprise. There’s no countertop or sink in the kitchen (I knew this when viewing the place, but was assured it would be in the by the time I moved in…but it wasn’t) so I had the pleasure of washing my dishes in the bathroom sink for a day. I got a new sink yesterday, which rocks because hey, everyone needs a sink. Its also pretty big and I like it.

The bathroom however, is another story. I made a tossup between the 2 apartments I liked (of the 3 I looked at in this building) and the bathroom in the first one was really gross while the range was new. The range in this one is old but the bathroom is a lot cleaner, so I chose the cleaner one. By which I mean the tub was not covered in what looked like cement. So when I take a shower now, the hot water leaks into the handle and makes the metal really hot to the touch, and the water doesn’t all make it to the shower head so I end up standing in 3 inches of water while I shower. I’ve been given a temp fix for this, but in the mean time I told the apartment manager and he’s relaying it to maintenance.

I talked to the office about my other problem, which is that the plunger in the toilet tank doesn’t seal properly and leaks, causing the toilet to constantly refill itself. This isn’t a huge problem for me (I don’t pay for water) but it is rather loud and annoying, and it does waste water. My stove also has 2 front burners that don’t work. One is missing a know so I tried it with pliers and still got nothing, and the other is very hard to turn and doesn’t do anything when I do. This things will all hopefully be fixed tomorrow.

On another note, my mom seems to get more and more incompetent.  I gave her my street address (the building number is 330) and today I call her about the tracking number (which took 10 minutes and 2 phone calls to find) of the package she sent me (way more apartment stuff than I actually needed but that could still be useful) and she reads it off to me:  no such address 3030 exists, UPS will try to correct and redeliver.  So I call UPS and give them the tracking number and they tell me that usually when they have to correct it it won’t be delivered that day.  So I say ok, fuck it.  I only didn’t do anything today because I had to be here for a package.  Now they want to redeliver it tomorrow so I have to call and say hold it til Wednesday so I can once again stay here all day and wait for them to deliver the damn thing.  This will force me to postpone things such as finding a cabinet for my bathroom and other furniture-ish things until Friday.  Yay.

My Parents are Incompetent

I spoke with both my mom and dad in the last the day and BOTH of them can no longer access my student account at the U of MN because they have FORGOTTEN THEIR LOGIN INFORMATION.   Both of them.  This is so stupid.  Then they continuously ask me to fix and I have again tell them they must call the number and do it I can’t do it for them.  They never seem to listen and I wish there was a way for less tech savvy people to deal with such things but alas there’s not and I must put up with it. 

The "dangerous” metrodome

So FOX 9 news here in the Twin Cities went to uncover a really hot story.  In the Metrodome there are a LOT of stairs.  One in particular tripped a woman in 1997, and she fell and broke her wrist.  Naturally, she sued and won $11,556.  So they put a bright orange stripe on it that has since become dull, and people continue to trip on it.  Its still a hazard.  The crazy investigative team spent 2 days measuring the height of all the stairs there and found 779 stairs that are 1/2 inch higher than the others.  This causes lots of people to trip because you get used to raising your foot to a certain height and then when you do, you trip b/c the stair is just a little bit higher. 

I mean I guess I appreciate their help.  I’ll remember it for when I go to the Metrodome (which will probably be never) and they spent so much time doing it as well.  No one writes to complain about it (as much as it happens) so it shouldn’t be that big a problem.  The response from the Metrodome was that their stairs are probably similar to those in both the Excel Energy Center stadium (here in downtown St. Paul) and in the Target Center (in Downtown Minneapolis).  So what did the news team do?  Yep.  They measured the stairs in both of THOSE stadiums too.  And did they find?  In both of those places there is no variation in the height of any of the stairs.  Thanks guys.  I hope this helps me plan which sporting events I’ll be going to in the future.

Oh well…at least the MN gophers are getting a brand new stadium with my tuition money so the fans won’t trip at the games.  Oh wait..I’d actually rather have to pay less than worry about tripping up some stairs…

This place is great