a-rchiang: August Already?

Monday, August 3, 2009

August Already?

It feels like July 3rd still and not August 3rd...July came and gone without too much excitement...I had the trip to be excited for in May and June. To say the least, the worst part of July was the weather! The best parts were Twilight and my employment! Good thing that both those things kept me inside for much of the day.

It's the end of the long weekend...once again it wasn't long enough...I spent some time catching up on Burning Flames 3 and my dad seems to serious about getting a car this time. We've looked @ some new Civic's over the weekend. The deal is that I'll make the remaining payments when I graduate, but while I'm in school for the next year, my parents will run it. I've warned them that I may continue schooling onto masters (I still don't know yet). It all depends on what is out there and how this next school year goes. I think the plan is still to make the effort to buy it tomorrow. This is all happening really fast. The model I'm interested in is the SPORT model with sunroof and alloy wheels. The DX-G model is more economical but the black door handles and alloy wheels aren't appealing. As for transmission, I'm tempted to buy a manual...but considering that there may be problems with other drivers in the house since no one has experience with the stick except my dad (but it's been years). manual does save gas and $1200 up front, but one wrong move could get you to the repair shop and it may be difficult to install a remote starter.

I watched Twilight over again on Saturday. I saw it once with the commentary and then again in full. The commentary and extended scenes did help me to alleviate the disappointments I had earlier but not all of them. I still can't get over the first few scenes when they first met. After they got together, I thought the movie was very good. I imagined the school to be made up of several separate units that were like trailers, one for each class and students had to walk outside between classes. I thought of it to be very shanty looking. I dunno, I guess there was so much more room for creativity when reading and when something in the movie didn't turn out to be how I imagined it to be, I got disappointed. I'm beginning to appreciate reading more than I used to, that is why I want to read more this summer.

I've also cleared out much of my hard drive, I now have about 108 GB of free space rather than the 50 GB I had earlier. I was hoping to speed up my mac, in particular the boot up speed. Though it is still pretty fast to start up, takes about a minute or two, it is much slower than when I first got it. It started up at under 30 sec, now the cog wheel seems to spin forever, lol. It looks like freeing up harddrive space isn't helping too much. I looked on Apple Support and I've tried a few things but nothing has really solved the problem. There are three more solutions that I haven't tried, two of them involve reinstalling the OSX. I think it may be something to do that because my system and apps folders amount to almost 30 GB. I think there is something wrong with them....because an OS should not take up 20 GB of space. Maybe I'll send a quick email to a friend and compare them. My apps folder is almost 10 GB...I really don't have that much installed...I think CS3 is the largest because it was several DVDs to install. If I reinstall my OS, one way would preserve my user files but I would still have to reinstall the programs and the other would clear everything and start again. The third solution is really a theory...that is that the 'non-apple' RAM isn't quite compatible or isn't functioning properly...I don't know what it is but I hope it isn't that. Besides the capacity, the specs between the old and new ram of my mac is virtually the same. On the Windows side, the VMWare files are quite big...I still can't figure out why the C drive is 14 GB big when I don't have much installed or docs. I think when I add all the folders in the drive, it only amounts to 9 GB. Of course the VMWare file is 18 GB. I've already removed the System Restore points and still nothing. I could try to create a new OS, I'm only afraid that AUTOCAD won't let me reinstall it...I shouldn't have downloaded it this early...I still haven't decided on whether or not to buy added warranty for this macbook pro...it's like $350...for two more years...I dunno...

I've finally completed my passport application forms...I kept on putting it off since April and now it's getting down to the wire. Well, August is here, only a month left. Here is what I still want to accomplish with my remaining summer time.