How do I start, today was one of those days where nothing goes as planned. One simply has to turn their head and keep going, and to quote Mama Cass “Make your own kind of music”. First off in the morning my step-mother started ranting to me about something at 7AM, for me coffee should come first. I simply said in response, coffee, black! Although she was speaking to me in English, I was so tired that some of it I actually was hearing in French, which kept perplexing me because she doesn’t speak a word of French, not even “bonjour”. To top it off, we were out of coffee (a bad thing for me, ever since Honors and AP classes, with late homework hours I have been addicted). A simple cup of Earl Grey would have to suffice, and although I love tea, have it mid-day, and at night, it has more of a delayed affect than coffee, you don’t get the same burst of energy, it is kind slowly dispersing throughout the day.
To make matters worse, my computer is going to be in for repairs longer than I expected, 5-10 days, for s a simple data backup and restore (I have provided them with a sufficient sized back-up external hard disk, and all they are to do is a simple disk image). I asked what caused the problems, and the response was plain and simple, vista corrupted its self. When my father asked what was wrong, the conversation went like this “What happened to it? Vista happened to it.” Well, at least they will be able to back up the system.
My tip for the day of anyone going to college, is that if you are planning on doing moderate printing, to invest in a laserjet printer. This may sound expensive, however base units now can be found for $60 or so on sale. Mine has been perfect, what happened was about two years ago my HP Deskjet 932C (inkjet) printer died after years of intense usage. I replaced it with an Epson CX7800 (all-in-one) which was an impulse buy, because I had wanted a negative scanner, and the scanner has a negative scan function, and it was a good deal. However not doing me research proved to be a bad thing, Epson is under a class-action lawsuit because the ink-monitor program when it senses ink is low stops the printer from printing, while there is still an estimated 30 pages left of ink. Lets say your printing a black and white word document and the magenta cartridge runs out, it won’t let you print, until you replace it, as there is no grey-scale mode. During AP’s I had this printer, and I was averaging printing out more than 35 pages a night in notes and homework, not only would the 35 pages or so take forever, but I was going through a cartridge a week, and I costed it out at $1 per page to operate. I finally gave in and bought a HP laserjet 1020 ($100) at the time. However it came with a starter cartridge about 1/4-1/2 full, (full cartridges are supposed to get 2500-3000pgs at $59 a piece). However the starter cartridge just died today, after two years and more than 4500pages! A great investment, even if the full cartridge achieves 2500pages comes out to $0.02 per page. It is a strong recommendation, not only is it more efficient however it saves massive amounts of time, and is well worth the extra money from an inkjet (most of which are not built to last more than a year or two).
My little anecdote for today is, related to the coffee. Two years ago, it was out of the honors level classes of 10th grade, and into the AP’s, one of which was A.P. U.S. History, we were supposed to have a legend of a teacher at our school, who unfortunately for us moved on to one of the large stat universities, and left us with a newbie teacher at the helm. Mrs. Woodward, who although ended up doing a great job, is addicted to coffee, and would often have 6-9 cups during a school day. A vehement democratic socialist, her class was not run as a democracy, and our assignments, combined with Alan Brinkely’s “A People’s History of America” was so bland, that it even made some of the most interesting events of our history such as the civil war, world war II, and the cold war an extreme bore, and enough to put a history buff to sleep. However our other 6 supplemental books proved to be fascinating. Our assignments often meant many days with little or no sleep, and tea simply wouldn’t cut it, so in her own way she made us all more or less coffee addicts. And I was given the pleasure of having her all over again last year for World History, which was fun (can you detect the sarcasm).
