Divide by Null - undefined

So this marks week two for UCLA, but I've really been here for three weeks, so it's my fourth week of living here. I've made new friends and experienced new things. It's quite exciting.

I'm not so sure what to say here; I don't want it to be a boring recount of what I've been going through.

Life in college... I'll try to sum up how it's been for me in a few phrases of a few words each: good roommates, many boring classes, skipped a (useless) discussion today, one class with great lectures, previously mentioned class requires lots of reading, band is pretty fun, trombones are crazy, made new friends, sooo many people here, lots of solicitors the first week, pretty good food (yum brownie goo), should really be doing reading right now, too much walking, too many hills, too many stairs, getting lazy, having fun.

I dunno, just some random thoughts to sum up everything.

Oh yeah, I got my Macbook Pro and it's quite amazing. I'm keeping the windows laptop too though. I got Synergy running, though, so I only need one mouse for both computers. It's more or less dual screen with different operating systems.

I feel like I should say more about my classes. In general, they're boring. Either the subject or the professor. The one that is exciting, at least the lecture, is the one that requires a lot of reading. Still, the first lecture (which happened to be my first class of the quarter), kept me interested, made me think; he's an lively, interesting professor talking about a topic he's passionate about too. So, if you ever need to satisfy a GE req. here at UCLA, take HIST 9E (Southeast Asian Crossroads) with Professor Woods.

On that note, I should get reading some of that stuff, or at least study for the map test in two days. Agh, buy your own scantrons? Anyway, I'll try not to abandon this thing as much anymore.

So I made it through Shutdown Day.

First to note, I've been offline for well over two weeks, but that's usually been because of dead computers or traveling. This was voluntary, in that I had access, but I would keep off, so willpower came to play a bit more.

It was interesting. It was fun, at times, and I think it's nice to keep away... again, at times, but not absolute. It wasn't fun to be with friends and sit back while they play each other in SSBM, but I can't merely because I said I wouldn't touch video games either. But then I know if I was a little lax and got on for only 5 minutes to check movie times, for example, that would end up as an hour of lost time.

Leisure was a topic on AP English not too long ago, and it's relevant here. Are computers leisure? Because there were times that I didn't feel relaxed, but rather boredom. Is it that I don't know true leisure? I mean, how did people entertain themselves before computers or TVs? I definitely know that I over did piano... I probably played for over 4 hours throughout the day, separated to three intervals, the last one not even at my house. But that one was fun because I was with people.

I wrote something down on my "offline blog" (read: notebook), "Given the choice of computer or going out, I'd probably choose the latter." Going out with friends is definitely more appealing than staying home. And this is the reason I'll be leaving soon, but first I must finish this blog.

No computer doesn't save energy either, for what I saved in electricity was lost in gas expenses from driving around aimlessly. I must say though, it was nice to not be in a rush driving. I averaged 65 on the freeway behind this one truck on the far right lane while most people passed me to the left. Then, I took quite the scenic route on the way home, avoiding the freeway altogether and taking random turns when I felt like it. Waste of gas? Perhaps, but it was fun to explore.

So will I do it again? Next year, perhaps. Otherwise, no. I'll just cut back on my computer usage, but it's not too good to completely sever the ties. Maybe I'll set limits some weekends to how long I'd like to stay online, or just work more to keep myself away. Either way, I don't regret doing this.

So let's start with the background information. I decided I wanted to restart my computer. I thought I might as well do some windows update right before, because that way I can save myself some restarts. It goes through that and in the process, the computer crashes. There's the irony: the computer crashed while performing an update. This is probably the part that is the direct cause of the end.

I restarted and it crashed once more, after another hour or so. However, this time, it wouldn't start back up. I used the XP CD to boot windows back up, and to my surprise, it said that the C drive was unable to be found, invalid, gone.

Yeah. No. Ugh.

To put it simply, all of my data, aside from anything stored online or on my flash drive is (apparently) gone. Tomorrow, I'm going to dedicate quite a bit of time to determine if the data can be salvaged. I'm not going down without a fight.

In conclusion, I'm really annoyed. Angry. Unhappy to a high degree. Srsly.

I'm now relegated to my laptop and I think I'm going to start to spend more time examining Linux. I need to learn how to get that working.