Virtually Missing

As some of you may have noticed, my usually ubiquitous online presence has been strangely absent lately. I haven’t been on Trillian (AIM), updating my blog, updating my Facebook, etc. Yeah, things have been insanely busy around here lately (even more so than I usually am at school) and my to-do list is depressingly long and getting longer. To top it off, both of my computers are INOP (inoperative) at the moment, but more on that later.

I still miss the MidEast like crazy, especially in this “limbo” state of suspended animation within my basement between Project and Purdue. I ended up taking over 1300 pictures while I was there and I haven’t even had the time to look through them more than twice or burn a DVD of them to send to my teammates. Hopefully I’ll get through enough of my “urgent” to-do stuff to be able to do that before I move back to school two weeks from yesterday. Yeah, Project was nothing short of amazing and I really wish we could have stayed longer.

My birthday went well on Saturday; I pretty much just took it easy most of the day (meaning I felt relaxed while trying to fix the lappy) and then had a few close friends over for pizza and videogames. In a decidedly unexpected twist, a full two-thirds of the “happy birthday” calls I got on that day came from the Upper West rather than the Midwest, where the majority of the people I know live (“upper west” might not be a real term, so just think of it as everything north and/or west of Wyoming). Now some of you are probably muttering under your breath about just how bizarre or idiotic a person has to be to actually post a fact like that online, but I figured it was just weird enough to be interesting (hey, it’s 12:15am, a lot of weird stuff is interesting at this time of night).

Quick preview of the next two weeks before I leave for school:
-We’re headed up to Minnesota from Friday to Monday to visit family and celebrate birthdays (we now have 5 of them within about a month of each other). I’m psyched because I haven’t seen my baby cousins since Christmas and I’ve heard they’ve changed quite a bit (one just turned 2 and is talking and the other just turned 1 and is reportedly highly mobile).
-Uhh…I really don’t know what we’re doing the rest of next week. Probably just going crazy with work and pulling our hair out.
-Next Sunday I’m probably going to be giving a 10-15 minute presentation on my Project to my parent’s Sunday School class at our church, so I’ll pick out a few pictures and a story or two and hopefully have enough time to prepare it rather than winging something like I did for them a couple of weeks ago.
-Then I just have a few days to pack and prepare to move back to Purdue.

Finally, the issue of both computers being INOP… The Lappy (“Shawn-M4,” my TabletPC) broke at the end of last school year and I had it repaired just before I left for Project. When I got back I wiped the hard drive and have been working in reinstalling everything and getting it set up just how I want it. So far I have most of my software installed, but I still have it isolated from the internet to protect it until I figure out a few problems I’ve been having (it hasn’t gone online at all since I wiped it). As for the Compy (“Shawn64”, aka “Mr. Collins” to some of you), the motherboard died a few weeks ago, so when I finally identified the problem I decided it’d be better to go ahead and upgrade now rather than just replacing the motherboard and then having to replace it again when I upgrade in a couple of years. The last part arrived on Tuesday and I started surgery that night. As it stands right now, the majority of the new parts are in the machine and I’m going to install Windows tomorrow (the remaining parts are add-on cards and I’ll install them once I have a stable build of Windows going). Then I’ll overclock, install my software, backup, and finally go online to update Windows and begin to use the machine again. Until then, I’m using my Mom’s Tablet for work stuff, email, and the occasional visit to Facebook or the news.

By the way, I think completely replacing the vast majority of parts in the compy and reinstalling Windows means that I should probably consider it a different machine. In its former life, it was named Shawn64 on my network because it was my first machine with a 64-bit processor. The “new” one is still 64-bit, but is also a dual-core processor (and the machine should be overall quite a bit more powerful than the last), so I don’t really want to keep the same name. Due to my sleep-deprived state and having put a serious lack of thought into the matter, I haven’t come up with anything yet. You can tell from “Shawn64”, “Shawn-M4,” and “Fujitsu” (the picture frame) that previous names have been primarily functional about describing each machine; I am open to suggestions that divest from that norm.

Ok, that’s it for now. No pics, no links, just a very-tired me sitting amongst the scattered parts of my beloved Compy at 1am pondering if this floor would be comfortable enough to save me a trip upstairs to my room for the night…