4, April, 2004 Various interesting things have happened recently. I'll put them in a list this time: My clarinet/saxophone teacher gave me a tenor saxophone. I am very glad about this, as I played tenor saxophone in jazz band in university, but always played the school's saxophone, since I lacked on of my own. So now I 'need' a baritone and a soprano to complete my collection. I completely reformatted my hard drive and reinstalled Windows. It runs much better now. I also set it up with two partitions: one for the OS and programs, and one for all my writings and various backups, so that I can reformat the first without losing all that is on the second. I found out that the school at which I am teaching won't hire me next year. They said that they lack enough money to continue their French program as they would like to. So when the summer ends, we are moving to China. Probably not, but we are willing to move across the country, and maybe further, to find a nice teaching job. We visited my parents' house, and found there my two oldest hard drives, one with a capacity of 105MB and the other with 850MB. The first one works fine -- I installed it into my computer along with my 40GB drive. It configures itself as PIO mode 0, which means really really slow, and the partition table is damaged, so I can read none of the data on the drive, but if I was to reformat it and use it then it would probably work. But my pen drive holds more than it, so there is little purpose in doing so. The second one doesn't work; the BIOS detects it, but the head seems to crash against it so that it makes a horrible clicking sound whenever I use it, and no computer I've tried it in can read anything from it. I'm curious about what is on them, though, and wish that I could fix them without erasing their contents. I actually have every hard drive I've ever owned: 105MB, 850MB, 5.5GB, 20GB, 20GB, 40GB, and all but the 850MB and one 20GB still work. Now the sun remains high in the sky later in the day as the clocks were all set forwards by one hour, so it finally feels like summer, at least somewhat. Today the sky is grey and rainy, and the air a bit cool, so it still feels like early spring. I miss Virginia and Ecuador: in those places the air was warm and the plants flowered and grew very beautifully. Here the sky is still grey, the trees bare of leaves, and the air cool, even in April. The church asked for me to play in their Easter service, and I decided to, so the music director gave me some music that she wants for me to play on my clarinet. My old clarinet/saxophone teacher and I met and decided to make a deal, since I said that I can't afford to play for lessons, in which he gives me music lessons in exhange for my teaching his children French. He also said that he wants to play a duet at his church someday soon. Sara finally received her new digital (or digitol, as she spells it) camera. It takes pictures in 3.3MP, which is about 2000x1700. It also as 3x optical zoom (and 2x digital zoom). I played Rygar from beginning to end last night. It's not a very difficult game, and it is rather fun because of its RPG/level-gaining element: one gains more hit points and attacks more powerfully as one gains experience. It is a neat system to impliment in a sidescrolling game, and it is similar to that in "The Adventures of Link." I wish that more systems had side-scrolling games, as just because all gaming systems and computers can handle 3D graphics doesn't necessarily mean that 3D games are always better. I still find some of them somewhat awkward--movements that would be very simple in real life, like turning and facing in the right direction, are very difficult sometimes in those games. Thoughts and Events