So, Winter Break flew by (or should I say "flu" by :-P) and I wound up back here, with pretty good classes, but also LOTS of work...
 

So I come back, and three days later there's SNOW outside.  Pardon my Hawaiianized reaction, but that's SNOW.  Dang...  (That Pepsi on my desk by the way is from the 3:45 show of Black Hawk Down that I saw with James and Rahul the day before--seriously good movie.)

For those of us having problems coping with the idea, I am pleased to bring you once more, SNOW.

In a bout of vigorous planning and curiosity, I made this wall calendar for the semester in Excel.  I scribbled the amounts of weekly reading I had to do in the left margin and taped the ticket stubs from Lord of the Rings and Black Hawk Down on it as well.

At about 12 am on Saturday, January 26, I was working on this very website, listening to music and whatever, and all of a sudden, the picture on my monitor flashed off.  Then the eight lights on the front of the damn thing, plus the power light, started blinking on and off, accompanied by a ticking sound from inside the monitor.  This was very distressing.  After troubleshooting for some time, I was able to coax as much picture from the monitor as you can see above.  My assessment of the situation was that something in the power connection had fried itself, so that charge kept building up somewhere and releasing in very brief spurts, creating a very irregular electrical current, and causing the monitor to turn on more or less constantly.  The image you see here then, is akin to taking a picture of the monitor in the instant it was turned on--the "corners" of the images are stretching out to the corners of the screen, but they never quite get there because the cathode ray tubes never become fully charged.  Essentially, the monitor was acting like a strobe in a very painful way for anyone trying to use it.

These pictures, as it happens, were taken when I was sending instant messages to Orian trying to tell him what was going on...  A short time later, I valiantly updated this site with the monitor still acting up, something which was probably not very healthy.

You might recall this picture of our suite taken in Fall 2001, displayed in my Dorm Life! gallery.  That monitor (which got broken during storage) is still there.

And now, sigh, it has company...  I plan to mail it back to Envision and get a replacement under the warranty...and SELL IT.

As we all know, college students cannot live without their technology, so Saturday afternoon, Jeff gave me a ride to Staples to buy a new monitor, and I wound up purchasing this gleaming NEC (namebrand this time) MS75 . . . for 180 (frickin) dollars!

Maybe if I take a picture with the monitor it won't break...

To be continued...