Life is a Cabaret

Jesus Christ. Once again one of my power cords has stopped working, but this can't be fixed as easily as a trip to the Apple store, considering that I have no idea where one is and that I imagine it will be cheaper if I get a new one at home and that I need one with a US plug anyway.

But I have two weeks until I go home, two weeks where I basically will not be able to use my own computer unless someone in one of my hostels is willing to let me use theirs to charge my computer for a bit.

GAH. *pulls hair*

This means that not only do I have to pay for the internet, but I can't read all the things stored on my computer for when I don't have internet, and I can't charge my iPod, because my computer is all I have to charge that with. I haven't used my iPod since last charging it so hopefully it'll be fine, but I'm going to try to avoid using it until that last plane ride home, I suppose.

Anyway, I'm in Salzburg, Austria at the moment, though I leave for Vienna tomorrow morning. Yesterday I went on the Sound of Music tour (hahaha never have I felt more like a tourist, which is really saying something, though I did win a free beer for knowing the name of the big mountain Maria is on in the beginning of the movie), and oh my God this country is beautiful. I think I love it more than Ireland now.

Also, goldy_dollar, we passed the headquarters of a hockey team, and my tour guide said that they've been winning games all across Austria, and the reason for this is that none of them are Austrian -- they're all Canadian. I immediately thought of you. XD

Okay, time to spend the rest of what time I have left reading fic! I need to get to my Remix, though the rest of the archive might have to wait until I'm home, sigh.

My computer is having issues with the internet here. It's being very sporadic. I've had this problem several other places but I never really cared before since I wasn't in those places for long, but I'm going to be here for three months and I can't have sporadic internet. So I might have to take my computer to an Apple store and see if I need a new wireless card or something.

Otherwise, been very busy! Today we took a boat down the Thames and went up to the Royal Observatory in Greenwich and I got lots of pictures of stuff. Like the London Eye. And Canary Wharf. I couldn't stop thinking about Doctor Who. XD

I have an early day tomorrow, so g'night.

OMG my computer is haunted.

I am just sitting here typing things and and not touching any keys beyond basically the alphabet and shift and return, and then iTunes comes up and starts playing. On its own. Then the computer pulled up an odd screen I never use and therefore don't know if I've really ever seen before, probably one of the F keys, and goes back into iTunes, and I have to use the escape key to get back because I don't know how to otherwise.

So it did that once, and that was odd. And then it just did it again.

WTF is going on?

This has been two-thirds Weekend of Suck and one-third not. The one-third basically consisted of being able to sleep in and being done with my paper.

Otherwise? I am sick. Probably just the kind of cold that I get pretty much every two or three months here, but it still makes me miserable while it's here.

So today I basically just slept in and then when I got up, it was only technically, because I grabbed a book and read for several hours. But then I wanted to go on the internet. Except that for some reason, the internet was not working.

And just for me, too. It wasn't my ethernet cord, because my roommate's didn't work for me either. It's not the internet in general, because my RA's was working fine. But when I went to the little computer lab on my dorm floor, the internet in there wouldn't work for me either, so I have no idea what's going on.

I'm in the library now. I want to just hang around on the internet and do all the things I normally do (ie read fanfic), but I imagine my guilt is going to chase me off soon enough, since someone is likely to actually need this computer for academic type stuff.

The tech people aren't open on weekends, so I'm going to have to wait until tomorrow to see if they can fix what's going on. Otherwise, I'm going to hope that it goes away on its own.

Bloody internet. I love you! Why do you hate me in return?

Have finished three of the four papers due on Monday. At least two of them need some editing, and I'm sure the one I'm going to do tomorrow and Sunday will as well, but I can do that.

Tonight I went to campus films with heart_of_man, and this weekend's was Mamma Mia, which I love. And of course it got me into the mood to listen to ABBA, but I don't actually have that many ABBA songs. So I went to iTunes to buy a few more, but iTunes is being annoying. I try to listen to that thirty-second preview they have of each song, but every few seconds it needs to "rebuffer stream", so the song ends up taking two or three times to load.

Anyone know what's up with this, and what I can do to fix it? I've got the latest version of iTunes, so I know it isn't that.

Also, I am ridiculously tired and am so going to bed soon. *snoozes*

Ethernet still not working properly. This morning before class I went to the help desk and they gave me a few suggestions, including calling them to troubleshoot on the spot if the first suggestions didn't work. So I called them, and eventually the guy troubleshooting told me I should bring my computer in to be looked at. *sigh* How the hell do I always get computers that have something wrong with them?

Both of my finals are tomorrow. I'm not worried about either of them, though, since I've got As in both classes and it's really damn unlikely I do poorly enough on them to lower my grade.

But the first final is at 7:30. In the morning. Why do people schedule things that early? Gah. I'm going to try to go to bed before midnight, but we'll see how well that works out. XD

My computer is still not recognizing my external hard drive, and I've just got no clue why. I looked up some troubleshooting tips on the website, but the only one I really understood enough to try requires another Mac to plug into (I guess to see if this problem is specific to my computer), and the only person with a Mac I know well enough to ask to borrow it is Twin, and she's still in Arizona. I think she's coming home this weekend, so at least I won't have to wait that long, but I want this problem fixed now! XD

Yesterday I went over to velesia's and made her watch "Fear Her". Mwah. Probably not the best introductory episode, but the other ones I had were Impossible Planet/Satan Pit, Love and Monsters, and Army of Ghosts/Doomsday. Out of all those, Fear Her is definitely better introductory material. Plus, flirty! She said she thinks the Doctor is cute (looks and personality), though as that's clearly what the episode is about, she got the gist. *g* (Oh, Vel. You should be glad I had this disc, rather than season 3, on hand. He's not very cute, personality-wise, in that season.)

We were also going to make snickerdoodles. Except we started pretty late, and by 11:30 the batter wasn't done chilling, so we decided to hell with actually baking the cookies, we could eat the dough! So we did, and it was good.

I got the DW S2 Confidentials today. There were also David Tennant's Video Diaries, and I squeed through much of that. How sexy does he look with his glasses? And stubble! And just, you know, all the time! And he kept licking his lips. :D He also seems like a real sweetheart, and I totally wouldn't have minded if they'd gone on a lot longer than they had.

How many of the S2 Confidentials are actually worth watching? 'Cause I watched all of the S1 Confidentials, but half of them (or maybe more, I forget) were technical stuff I wasn't really interested in. I want talking about the characters/plots, plzkthnx. Or, on the other hand, lots of David Tennant.

Now, O Wonderful Flist, I need your help. I am trying to watch .avi files on QuickTime, but they won't play! My computer is completely up-to-date, software-wise, so I have no idea what the problem is. It's just, I download something, but when I try to play it, I get nothing but a blank screen. QuickTime keeps telling me there's a component I need to download, but I've downloaded it twice and nothing happens. I have no idea what's going on or how I can fix it. Maybe I shouldn't even be bothering trying to watch .avi files with QuickTime, but in that case, I don't know what else I can use.

Help?

eta: And why can't I find any good icons of the TARDIS? Gah. *frustrated*

My computer is working again. Thank you to tinnidawg and nandamai for the suggestions, but they wouldn't have helped; I took my computer to my local Apple store, and the tech guy said that the computer thought it didn't have a hard drive. It just burned itself out completely. I was apparently unlucky enough to have gotten a somewhat defective model, but at least it decided to burn itself out while I still had my warranty.

But my old hard drive is completely lost, unless I want to pay upwards of $800 to have some guys take it apart in a clean room and get all my stuff back. I'm really, really glad I'd already had my remix done and off to beta, or else I would have lost it and had to rewrite it less than a week before the deadline. As it was, I lost all my music again, and damn iTunes for not allowing us to re-download already purchased songs! Why do I keep forgetting to back up my music? *sigh*

The only other thing I really lost was an X-Files fic I was about five pages into, maybe half-way. I hadn't gotten around to backing it up because I'd only started it a few days before my hard drive melted, and while I have gotten better about backing things up (I did not, for instance, lose Burnt by the Sun, thank God), that was just too recent. And I'm sad, because I liked that fic. I liked what I was doing with it, where I was going.

I can rewrite the fic, of course, and I'm probably going to, because I still want to tell that story. But I hate rewriting things. Unless there was a turn of phrase I particularly liked, I don't remember my precise words, just the gist of what I was saying, and when I have to rewrite, there's always the chance that it'll turn out worse than before. There's also the chance it'll turn out better, but I've always been the type to fiddle with my sentences until I'm happy with them, and I was happy with that fic. If I lose a fic and have to rewrite it, I'm never sure if it can live up to the original version. And there's always the sense that I already wrote this, I want to move on to the stuff I haven't written yet, the stuff that's still in my head. But I can't write that until I've got the other stuff back, at least up till the point I left off; if I start writing from that point on, it might not quite fit what I'll eventually have to go back and begin with. All too often I'll have dialogue in my head that I want to get out, but I keep having to adjust it to fit the story, and I don't want to have to revise this fic more than what's already required in order to get to at least where I left off.

This fic was really flowing. Having to rewrite so much totally interrupts that flow, and already I'm reluctant to just sit down and start because I haven't felt that flow again yet. It's really annoying. Gah. *sigh*

I have my computer working again. Well, I got it working again on Friday; I've just been really lazy about updating LJ.

Completely reinstalled OSX, though--as in, starting over from scratch. I shouldn't have had to do that, really, but there wasn't enough space on my harddrive to reinstall without deleting everything first, and there only wasn't enough space because I was too lazy to delete the damn volleyball video for my younger sister's college apps that my dad made several months ago. It was even in the fucking trash--I just never got around to emptying the trash. *sigh* And the campus tech guys did say that given a few days they'd at least be able to get some stuff off my harddrive, but I just wanted my damn computer working again, and it's not like I had anything on here that I couldn't replace pretty easily.

I never thought I'd be glad about not having written much fanfic lately, but it does mean that I haven't lost much. At least, not fanfic-wise. Which brings me to part of the point of this post.

I've lost everything in my iTunes library. I've actually been pretty good about putting all those songs on my iPod, so I've still got all the music, it's just not on my computer anymore. And I know there are programs that allow you to transfer songs from iPod to iTunes, but the ones I've downloaded either don't work or I can't figure them out, so I was wondering if anyone could recommend a program that would allow me to get my music back.