Watch this Potassium react with the h2o *blam!!!*

Martin Wu from LiteOn totally found the drivers for the wireless card, so the card is a go. Just need the display utility and the ethernet driver, and we're all set.

UPDATE: After spending all week hunting down drivers, making countless slipstreamed windows installers, breaking google in half, crawling forums like a madman, I stumble across a three page forum thread dedicated to getting rid of Vista and installing xp for this EXACT MODEL OF COMPUTER. LINKED IN THE FORUM POST IS A PAGE WITH EVERY SINGLE XP DRIVER FOR EVERY PIECE OF HARDWARE IMAGINABLE FOR THIS EXACT LAPTOP.

*bangs head into wall*

My friend bought a laptop (Gateway MX8738). He quickly found out that he wasn't a fan of Vista, so I said I would install XP Pro on it for him. I recently did something similar to this on a windows 98 computer for a relative, where I put in new parts (hard drive, ram, WLAN card), and installed windows xp pro perfectly fine.

So it looked like a relatively easy task. I used DBAN/Nuke to wipe the hard drive, then I popped in the xp pro disc. Then I got an error. I googled around and found out I needed a SATA driver. Unfortunately, these have to be installed via floppy. The laptop doesn't have a floppy drive, so I slipstreamed the driver using nLite. I made a disc, and started to install. I got past the original error until I got another error telling me my driver was corrupted. (iaStor.sys)

Then I found that I might have needed to change some drive configurations in the Bios (version 72.15). I've looked through it for a good half an hour and cannot find anything to do with the hard drive other than boot order.

So the question is, am I screwed?

Rick Roll!

1) You can't scroll on the trackpad to stop your screensaver. You must click the mouse.

2) The rainbow volleyball pops up while watching iTunes videos.

3) Opening a digg story is the equivalent of asking the rainbow volleyball over for dinner.

4) Saving a file in textedit is offering him dessert.

5) Your battery lasts less than an hour on the 'more battery life setting' and the lowest brightness setting.

Is anyone else hating on the new vox homepage. Uuuuuuuuugly!

I'm going to sign all of my posts as "Jordan Stearns -- Literary Critic" from now on. I believe it was the great Winston Churchhill (who was terrified of the Village People btw) that said, "We must take our inspiration from complete idiots."

This is possibly my best english paper yet. You will have to have read both books to get it though...

Compare and Contrast - The Scarlet Letter and Slaughter-House-Five
   
    Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter and Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughter-House-Five are mostly different books in term of stylistic elements. This is because of the difference in the time periods when they where written, and their subject matter. Though however different they are, they manage to have things in common.
   
    The Scarlet Letter shares a similar syntax to Slaughter-House-Five. The Scarlet Letter has very long, drawn out sentences that mainly describe the characters, describe what they are doing, what they are thinking, or what they plan to do in the future. A simple sentence, “Hester walked down the street,” could be turned into “Hester walked down the street, with the shame of a platypus, bearing the burden of her scarlet letter like Hulk Hogan with a Big Mac the day after Thanksgiving. Slaughter-House-Five shares this trait, with sentences similar to “Billy was scared out of the left side of his cerebral cortex while the Tralfamadorians jeered at him through the glass sphere, using telekinesis to call him shallow and pedantic.” These similar forms of syntax are about the only comparable trait of the two books.
   
    The mood between the two books are basically on the opposite ends of the spectrum. The Scarlet Letter features a dark mood, full of lies, deception, and revenge. Imagine stealing candy from the store as a little kid with your friend, and getting in trouble for it, but then everyone knows about it. But your friend is nowhere to be friend. And friend number two, who you had originally planned to steal the canndy with, but forgot about it, is planning to tell on you, so you get in even more trouble. Slaughter-House-Five is much more imaginative, like a story about unicorns and gremlins, but still has that sick twist,  that one would write in the fourth grade for creative writing. This is the major difference between the two novels.
   
    Diction is also a key difference. The Scarlet Letter has words from the 19th century. Augur, physiognomy, ignominious, edifice, antinomian, countenances, and escutcheon are all examples of the diction in the story. Words you are forced to copy and paste from a long list of big words in the Scarlet Letter. Slaughter-House-Five contains a rather average vocabulary, suitable to the current time period. Words like red, dog, and the all come to mind quickly. While the Scarlet Letter’s diction will help you in final jeopardy, the readability of Slaughter-House-Five is a direct contrast to this.
   
    All in all, both novels are actually similar in a sense. In 200 years, Slaughter-House-Five may be hated with a passion by students as much as the Scarlet Letter is today. They contrast each other in terms of style, but the message is suitable for the time period.

What was your reaction to the results of the Iowa caucuses?  

Told ya Henry!

iGTD is awesome! It's a getting things done app on steriods.

The organization, folder system, and flagging work epicly. The best part is, it's free!

*If only there were a way to piece this, iCal, and google calendar together. Blast!*

Here's some stuff from my camera fiddlings. A bunch of fun wide-angle stuff, and some other general things. Learning depth of field and f-stops. It used to confuse me, but my mind has been magically opened to understanding it. Kinda like algebra.

I can't fathom why people spend thousands of dollars at a college to learn this stuff. Google = Best Friend.
(Even though I didn't use it in this case, but I could've!!!)

I also remembered I have a flickr page. Who knew?