I've been having issues with Thunderbird, Mozilla's email client. It's perfectly lovely at school and at Mr B------'s house, but won't let me send outgoing mail from my house. I learned that this is because I have to use my internet service provider's SMTP address rather than the Umich one, but I couldn't find documentation of this.

So I called up my telephone/internet provider and went through all of the button-pushing rigamarole before I got to be put on hold. The music began and I was sort of annoyed that they were using their own proprietary jingle-music instead of anything real - it was all about calling your home and billing your house and things... but the most frightening thing was that the hold music knew my name.

While I was waiting, I Googled the lyrics and discovered it was not a jingle, but rather Fleetwood Mac:

'He said "Sara, you're the poet in my heart
Never change, never stop..."
But now it's gone, it doesn't matter what for
And when you build your house, well then, call me home'

I don't have this mp3, but here are a few others for your listening pleasure, all written by people who don't know how to spell:

Jefferson Starship - Sara
Hall & Oates - Sara Smile
Ben Folds - Zak and Sara

Update: I have fixed it! I am a genius!

Remember back when Gmail was exclusive and everyone was clamouring for invites to the club? Well everyone and their mother and their kitchen sink already has a Gmail address now and I've got six (last I checked) to give away. So is there anyone left on Earth who doesn't have one and wants one?

Update: Four.

Update: Three.

Update: Two. Take that, Jezzles!

If you're trying to email me on my school account and your messages are bouncing back, it's because they're migrating us over to a different system and they don't know what they're doing. So in the meantime, please try srah-at-srah-dot-net or quesrah-at-gmail-dot-com. Thank ye kindly.

Does anyone have a GMail invite they feel like throwing away? I'm sure I have too many email addresses already and wouldn't actually use it, but I'm a lemming and I'd like to know what all the fuss is about...

Update: Mike Toole is my hero! Wait... omigod, Mike Toole read my blog!

Update again: "Server Error: Gmail is temporarily unavailable. Cross your fingers and try again in a few minutes. We're sorry for the inconvenience." :(

I am such a nerd. I don't even own a PlayStation of my own, but I am very excited at the prospect of my PS2-owning friends buying this.

The song list includes:

"Baby One More Time"
"Born To Be Wild"
"Cry"
"Drift Away"
"Every Breath You Take"
"Friends In Low Places"
"Genie in a Bottle"
"Heartbreak Hotel"
"Here Without You"
"Hot Stuff"
"I Believe in a Thing Called Love"
"I Hate Everything About You"
"I Will Survive"
"I'll Make Love to You"
"I'm With You"
"Irresistible"
"It's My Life"
"I've Got You Under My Skin"
"Jesse's Girl"
"Lady Marmalade"
"Let's Get It On"
"Miss You"
"My Girl"
"Papa Don't Preach"
"Perfect"
"Rich Girl"
"Rock and Roll All Night"
"Sittin' on the Dock of the Bay"
"Sweet Home Alabama"
"The First Cut is the Deepest"
"The Joker"
"Toxic"
"Virtual Insanity"
"We Are Family"
"White Flag"

I have been trying very hard not to be the New Parent who thinks that their baby is the most amazing thing in the world and has to tell you about everything that it does as if it were something special, when you know very well that millions of other babies can do the same thing. I think this is why I haven't been blogging regularly - I've been playing with Isidore and reveling in all of the amazing things I can do and the amazing places I can compute from but trying not to blog about all of them.

So... I think I'm going to have to give in and be that Obnoxious Parent for a while. Sorry.

I am typing things in a car! I don't have wireless access here, but I am still typing for later! Then I will type things at Grandma's house! And at cemetaries in Ohio! I have typed in my living room! In my bed, for hours on end! In my bathroom! At work, although I dragged Isidore all the way down to campus before realizing that the wireless network doesn't extend outside of the Union! He's going to my internship tomorrow!

Isn't he just so special? Doesn't he make you want to tickle his screen? Couldn't you just eat him up with a spoon?

I am blogging this from my bed! But I could be blogging from the toilet and you wouldn't know any different! Such is the power of laptop!

Online package tracking is really not necessary. I don't need to know that my laptop had its origin scan in Maumee, Ohio at 1:42pm yesterday or that it had its departure scan from Maumee at 7:32pm yesterday or that it arrived in Ypsilanti at 12:45am this morning or that it went "out for delivery" at 1:23am this morning and is currently listed as "in transit" in Ann Arbor.

In the old days, I would have been perfectly happy to know when it was expected to arrive and to sit around, impatiently waiting for it. This is all more information than I really need to have access to. And yet... I do have access to it, so I have to look it up every time I'm online.

Do I have to go to work today? Can't I get some ITity leave or something?

"You betta buy it."

"Oh, it's already been BOUGHTEN!"

Is it insane that the same system would have cost about $50 more to buy with a U-M student discount? Maybe I'm broken and don't know how to apply discounts correctly. Who cares? Who cares? It's mine, all mine and baby is due on the 25th. Ten fingers! Ten toes! It's the freakiest computer ever! P'raps we'll have to have a Name the Baby contest...

Proud laptop owner! I am finally catching up with the twentieth century!

I am using a public computer with one of these hooked up to it. The space bars (!) aren't as responsive as I'd like them to be, but it's flat and silent and perfect for those who enjoy (or don't enjoy) ruining keyboards by spilling tea all over them.

1) I like group work.

Maybe I’m just saying that because I get a week away from my 622 group and I have not yet gone through next week’s heinous pain that is Project Managing the Survey Report. But working with my supervisor and his assistant, I realize that I actually have some skills to contribute and can come up with some good ideas. It’s not so much that I’m great at HCI compared to other HCI students, but I am more aware of HCI issues than are non-HCI people.

Having this work experience makes me feel like I might be able to contribute something to a Real Job someday in the Real World, whereas being at SI just makes me feel bad about myself. I almost feel like I’m going through the torture of grad school for a reason now.

2) You can do some damn cool things with a Mac.

I’m working in another Mac-based environment here at the CDT.

My favorite feature is the little square on the left of the right-hand side, which resizes your window to “as big as it needs to be.” This is very useful for switching back and forth between a full-screen and half-screen view while copying down text from a web site.

I also like the fact that you can drag things around to save or install them. You can just drag graphics from your Internet Explorer window to a Microsoft Word window rather than copying and pasting or saving and inserting. And they go all cutely transparent while they’re being dragged.

On the other hand, you can’t drag information between text input fields and my little <b>, <i> and <URL> buttons don’t show up in Movable Type. I’m not completely sold on Macs and I’ m not going to rush out and buy one, but the more I learn about them, the more I appreciate them.

It’s only Wednesday! How many more shocking revelations can I have? Perhaps the one later in the week will be along the lines of I have so much freaking homework due next week that I have not started.

Soon we will be living in a society where all of the "Save" icons represent an object that no computer-user has never seen. We could change it, but somehow a picture of a CD-ROM doesn't evoke the same saving sentiment in me that a floppy disk does.

I think I'm the worst Human-Computer Interaction specializationist* ever. Why am I always the one whining about how we don't get paper copies of anything, or how optical mice aren't as good as roller-ball ones, or how we seem to spend all of our time in Foundations classes talking about business and computers and never about libraries or archives? I should probably be, like, embracing technology or something, shouldn't I?

In other grad school news, Use of Information should probably be retitled How to be a Consultant. The entire purpose of the class seems to be to train consultants. I suspect, however, that the point of the class is really to teach us how to do group work and that consulting is only a red herring. It's all a façade, you fools!

* Because "specialist" sounds like I actually know what I'm doing. What is up with all of these footnotes? Damn you, Justin, and your seductive footnoting ways!

I don't like these new-fangled optical mice. There's something very satisfying about being able to open up your mouse and dig around inside and clean out the innards. I don't know how you're supposed to clean an optical mouse. They must get all kinds of hand oils and dust and gunk in the cracks between the buttons. That's the only explanation I can find for the lab-mouse* that I was using today, which refused categorically to click on anything.

Plus, when you turn over a regular mouse to try to clean it, your eyes aren't burned out by lasers, as mine were.

* In that it was a computer mouse in a computer lab. Ha ha.

There are so many groups I have to join that, despite my professor's urgings, I was putting off joining an Understanding Networked Computing study group for as long as possible - at least until I had my actual work groups in other classes planned out.

But I think I'm going to have to give in sooner rather than later. Today in lecture, I felt like my brain was panting as it tried to keep up with the professor. I got a stabbing pain in my head at one point, which I think may have been a brain cramp. Poor unused brain. So unused to exercise*.

Kernel? Isn't that what's left at the bottom of the popcorn bowl? Linux? Isn't he Luxy's brother, who wanders around with his security blanxet? Who? What? Where am I?

I'll have to appeal for volunteers and look for someone to help me whip the ol' noggin into shape.

* How did I use the word "unused" twice in such close succession? It's actually pretty cool that they aren't even the same word or pronounced the same. Sometimes I write things by accident that are pretty cool.

Further frustrations: Where's the Delete key? Where's the End key? WHERE IS MY RIGHT MOUSE BUTTON?

So... Macs are superfun.

I can drink tea with milk at work and I did manage to be slightly productive today, so all in all, I'm pretty content here at the new place of employment. I made progress and learned how to do some things Mac-wise, even though I kept clicking the imaginary right mouse button and de-selecting my text.

I am a piratical maid-of-all-work, but hopefully later this week I will be removing the Webmaster Beanie* for a while, putting on my Librarian Hat* and tackling the bookshelves, all the while hoping that people won't come into the center and expect me to put on my Peer Advisor Sombrero*.

*Note: the headgear mentioned in this post does not actually exist outside of my imagination. But wouldn't it be great if it did?

My new workplace is a Mac environment and uses Dreamweaver for their websites. Between a new program and an unfamiliar operating system, I feel like a friggin' moron.

The iMac is turquoise and plasticky and fake-looking. I think it might be just a pretend computer. It doesn't help that the desk comes up to my armpits and I can't seem to adjust the chair any higher. I would feel five except that those damned five-year-olds can probably adjust to new computing platforms a hell of a lot more easily than us agèd twenty-three year olds. Where are my accent shortcuts???

My 100 Things page has been edited. Some things on the old one were no longer true (I have successfully boiled an egg, although I've now forgotten how) and some were replaced by other things. None are fascinating or worth reading. So go read them.

I think a new design (for the blog at least) is in the air. It's been a year and a half. Something simple, I think.

Is anyone else having trouble with Albion's alumnimail server, or am I alone in my cursèd state?

I've been doing a bit of shopping-around for a laptop recently, but I don't know exactly what I want. However, thanks to my computer-advisor, who we will call Robert*, I have found something that looks like it will fit my needs.

* Real name: Bob

DEEEEEEEEEEEEEE ESSSSSSSSSSS ELLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL!

I have just been struck with an idea for a complete re-design and re-structuring of JohnHannah.net. I want to get started on it right away.

But I have so many other things to do.

Poor, neglected JH.net. I haven't been giving you the attention you deserve for... oh, about a year. I will save you soon.

But I have to clean my room first. Mommy said so. I need to have priorities, and JohnHannah.net isn't as high a priority as real life. Besides, we haven't even finished the blog archives, so we shouldn't go starting something new...

Real life? Who cares about real life? We wants to fix the website. It's our precious...

No! We loves the Mommy and we will clean our room.

Mommy? She's just jealous. She wants to take The Precious away. Precioussssssssssssss...

Dudes, I am hopeless. I tried to put in a Blogroll to update my links and it didn't work at all. Why am I broken? Why don't I know how to do the simplest computer things? Why, when I put it in, did it refuse to be the font-size I told it to be and did it insert random insane characters into all of my other javascript scripts that messed them all up? I think I will have to give up all hope of ever putting this thing on Movable Type because I can't even do this. Help help help...

Have you noticed how boring srah has gotten since she returned home? This is because it takes so long to boot up the computer, dial in to the Internet, wait for Blogger to load and then worry about learning how to type things in English. Please leave blahblahs to try to convince srah's parents that their Human-Computer-Interaction-student daughter needs DSL. I don't think they'll be impressed, but hey.

I'm going to graduate school to learn how to make web sites based on the principles of information science. I hope that my sites will be simple yet attractive, practical and easily navigable. The point will be for information to be accessed in the most convenient way possible. In other words, they will be everything that this isn't.

No one told me the school had a website. And it's not the type of thing I could have found out for myself, since there's no text to come up in search engines. I am disappointed that I am not prominently featured - in fact, enseignement générale is pretty well overlooked. You may, however, gaze upon the visages of my students Aude, Haouess and Sylvain. I would link to their individual pages but, as previously mentioned, this site is a mutant and has no pages.

Note: I suggest that you choose the full-screen version (affichage plein écran), because otherwise you will keep hitting the Back key like an idiot and being transported back to the index page. Not that this happened to me personally about a thousand times or anything. To go up one level, click Sommaire. To close the full-screen version, hit Alt+F4.

Punaise. Siobhan, the Irish English assistant, has stumbled upon a computer that is connected to the Internet. As I suspected, there is Internet some places in the building, but not in the public labs. My problem is that the computer she has discovered is one of the grading computers, which I'm pretty sure we're not supposed to be using. The Internet, wicked siren that it is, is calling to me with its evil tempting song, but I don't want to get in trouble if I'm not supposed to be using it.

Perhaps I shall ask Señor Tails if I may use it when no one else wants it. And if he says no, I will bite him.

And I don't have class for another two hours. My students are here in the library with me, but they're being very studious and working, so I don't want to bother them and I wouldn't have anything to say to them even if I did, other than. I may have to start reading the dictionary or - even worse - surfing Encarta and digging up super-neato facts to share with you. Mwah ha! If you want the torture to end, you should write to my school and demand some answers on why there is no Internet. If I've understood correctly, the last I heard was that we're not a very high priority for the Académie de Clermont-Ferrand, and that it's them who have to fix us up, or at least pay to have us fixed up. Eejits.

Why does Sarah come to school over three hours before she actually has to teach anything? And more importantly, why didn't she bring anything to read? And even more importantly, why can't she spend all of this free time surfing the Internet?

I have heard a nasty rumor that the administration (including the dastardly Señor Tails) still have Internet access, while the rest of us suffer without. We must try not to believe such rumors, for to do so might make flames shoot out of our ears and singe the nice students sitting nearby. Mustn't hurt nice studentses. But if that mean tricksy syssssstem adminisssstrator has our preciousssss, we wants it, and we just might have to start chewing fingers off to get it.

Today is the 12th of January! Do you know what that means, children? Mouse over for the joyous, happy response!

Señor Tails ne sait toujours pas when the Internet will be fixed, even as we approach the one-month mark. If this hadn't been ridiculous for several weeks now, I would make the observation that this is starting to get ridiculous. Perhaps we will have it as a cadeau de Noël when we get back from the break.

Fat lot of good that does me when I can't find the lyrics to Christmas carols or a recipe for (urp!) eggnog.

Fire drill again!

We lost the Internet last time we had one. I had hoped that it would come back after this one. My hopes were even encouraged by seeing Señor Tails in the CDI when we came inside. Perhaps he was reconfiguring things! Perhaps everything was finally fixed!

Nope.

"Do you know when we'll have Internet again?" I asked him, my eyes full of innocent wonder and nonchalance, as though it wasn't really important and I was just wondering. This is the way you have to approach these Technology Gurus, or whatever his job title is. You mustn't be demanding or accusatory or ask things like "How in God's name does it take three weeks to get a school back online in the twentieth century in a relatively technologically advanced country?" You mustn't look directly at the Guru, but instead cast your eyes downward in a submissive way as you approach, hunched over and ready to bow down on the ground whenever he is ready to pay attention to you. You may be required to offer some kind of gift or sacrifice.

"Internet? Still don't know," he replied. So I shot him.

Onomatopoeia, here we come.

I was sitting at my computer post in the CDI when my computer - and all those around it - suddenly went *glub*. For some reason the lights in the CDI had been off all afternoon anyway, so we didn't realize that all of the power had gone out. We all looked at each other, confused and accusatory, then looked out the window and noticed what had happened.

Then the delightful sound started. *MEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEH*, went the alarm. Luckily it was a bit muffled from inside the CDI, but as we sat at our computers, waiting for them to rallumer, people would open and close the doors, trying to see what was going on in the hallway, creating a sort of MEEeeeeeeeeeeeEEEeeeeeeEEEeeeee effect.

No one rushed outside and I later learned that it was because this alarm was not the normal fire drill bell, but one that the students had never heard before - some kind of burglar alarm thing. We sat in the CDI for a while, but when we saw other students filing outside, we... sat in the CDI for a while more. The general feeling I got from my fellow CDIers was Burning up is fine - at least we'd be warmer than those poor suckers out there.

Finally I left, more because I wanted to see what was going on than anything else. I stood around in the cold a while and gravitated towards a group of teachers who I knew from sight but had never talked to. I was thus very happy when I found English teachers, because I actually knew them to talk to.

People started gravitating back indoors, even though the alarm was still going off. I found another group of teachers and administrators I sort of knew and stood around and listened while they talked. Finally the lights came on and I decided I might as well go back to the CDI.

So here I am. What a great story. The network is back up, but I can't get anywhere on the Internet. La la. This would be a good time to write a grad school essay if one were motivated to do such a thing.

For some reason, the filters here seem to think that writing a novel is cihpargonrop, so I can't see my last post.

Speaking of school and the title of my cihpargonrop post, is anyone at this school not named Romain or Aurélie? Anyone? Bueller?

Dudes, I am hopeless. I tried to put in a Blogroll to update my links and it didn't work at all. Why am I broken? Why don't I know how to do the simplest computer things? Why, when I put it in, did it refuse to be the font-size I told it to be and did it insert random insane characters into all of my other javascript scripts that messed them all up? I think I will have to give up all hope of ever putting this thing on Movable Type because I can't even do this. Help help help...

On a positive note, while waiting for dinner time to roll around, I finally got bored enough to sit down and sort out my graduate school applications. Half of it will be off to Rackham as soon as I get to La Poste, and all that's left to do is the essay.

Thankfully Mr Colas, the harried Technology Maestro at the school, says he'll be setting me up a user ID next week. Then I'll have access to the school's intranet diskspace, so I won't have to do the whole thing in one sitting.

Now that I have typed the word yhpargonrop, I can't get to my blog either. Very smart. Must find a way to fix it.

Ineffective yhpargonrop filters.

This school has some kind of idiotic filters set up, which tell me that the JohnHannah.net Career page and the Television Without Pity MDs recap have yhpargonrop on them, so I can't see them. On the other hand, I sat down at a computer yesterday with a folder called ""tludA" with an icon of a dekan woman. Lovely.

This page is accessible in China. Is yours?

I hope no one expects me to ever have an up-to-date browser. Setup failed again. I give up. I will have to transport my ginormous CPU to a land of happy glamourous fast connection or something.

I love this connection. I am updating IE from 5.5 or whatever I had to 6, because Sue's blog told me to. I've already downloaded the installation program, so now it's going about installing the things I picked (I may have gotten a little greedy with my Pan-European language support and all, but hey - a girl has to learn Bulgarian sometime). Only 4 hours and 6 minutes remaining! It'll be done in no time!

When you're writing in HTML, how do you pronounce a href in your head? Is it "ay aitch are ee eff"? "Ay huh-REFF"? Or do you not pronounce it at all? Am I just a nerd?

My answer is the second one, by the way. If you cared.

But Albion still sucks.

I should have known it wasn't you, beloved Blogger. It is Albion who deleted our old GroupWise email accounts and deleted our ability to FTP to our webpages while they were at it. Doh! Oh, we gave you a year of free hosting... but we didn't think you'd want to update at any point during that year... I need a new host.

So here I am, still blogging, even though it's not publishing...

Why haven't I been able to publish my blog through Blogger for the past two days? Is it their fault or Albion's? Has anyone else (outside the Albion system) been having trouble? Why am I even writing this, if it's not going to get published? Maybe there will be a freak miracle.

I hate Yahoo!. They've screwed over the JHAC's archives, lost our photos and filled it with ads.

Computers are hard. Programming is hard. I require much patience and explanation.

Krista's new site design is lovely and I wouldn't even have the faintest idea where to start in terms of designs like that and frames and graphics and such nonsense.

I'm going to go home and hide in a hole, far away from computers. Probably not. I'll probably fire it up and be blogging as soon as I get home. I like blogging. It's something I can do. My blog is always there for me. Yahoo! is not going to screw over my blog. Yes, it may have a funny blue satin background and be rather silly looking, but it's home.

Gah. I want skills. No stress and skills.

I generally don't like Macromedia Flash. I usually click "Skip Intro" on Flash introduction pages, because it takes forever to load and play (especially on my slow computer) and doesn't really present any useful information. Sometimes Flash can be useful - if, for example, you really need to pretend you are Thierry Ardisson and have a little keyboard to play the sound clips from "Tout le monde en parle". Which, of course, I do. But Flash introductions are usually skipped and if I link to a site, it will be to the page after the intro.

Someone in the JHAC keeps pushing me to learn Flash so that I can put it on the JH site. To that I say: "Bah." I wouldn't put it on my page just because I could, if I knew that people like me were going to be annoyed and skip it. I also say, "Put Flash on your own site if you like it so much." I like my sites clean and simple, easy and quick to load, and without a lot of bother. I like my technology and Internet gadgets to do something useful and make the information-finding process easier. Maybe they're not as flashy as some others, but I like 'em.

Reasons I don't like being at home (so far):

1) The Internet connection is really slow.
2) I mean reeeeeeeeally slow.
3) It took me, like, half an hour to get through to the Blogger website.

I think Blogger and Albion are having some kind of FTP argument that's screwing up my weblog. Waaaaaahhh.

I hope I learn something valuable in Survey of Computing. Sometimes I feel like a complete ignoramus in the world of computers. I can probably do more than the average person on the Internet, but there are still lots of people who are more skilled than I am... and I have no idea what to do when I have a computer problem (alt+ctrl+delete and hope it goes away when the computer restarts...) or how the buggers work on the inside.

I technically could graduate in December, but I'll be using this last semester to pick up valuable computer and business French skills to use in my future career... whatever that is.

Hooray! My email seems to be back! I hope I didn't miss anything important, as the most recent email in my Inbox is from the 11th and I know I had unread mail when it crashed...

I trudged, disgraced and beaten, back across campus and called the Help Desk from my room to see if they could do anything about my email. They didn't sound very helpful or knowledgeable, so I fear that I will not have my email back any time soon. Oh bah. And the emails that are coming in are being sent back - it's not just that I can't get to them.

I need a hug.

I am insane. I am computer illiterate. I am hiding from the Department of Information Technology.

I have gone crazy with mp3s, having discovered that I can access the "Eric's" folder in the basement of the I-House. So because I didn't have much room on my H: drive, I emailed them to myself. A lot of them. It didn't seem like so many at the time... but now GroupWise is crashed and I can't get to it at all. I'm going to have to go 'fess up soon. The worst part of this comes in two parts:

1) After sending myself all of those files and thus crashing GroupWise, I discovered that I can access those network directories from my computer, after all.
2) After managing to download the files and put them on my H: drive, I came over to the library to burn them onto CDs and realized that I have no idea what I'm doing, because the burner has spit two of them out. They are probably now unusable.

So let's review: feeling stupid, no email, two ruined CDs.

At least tutorial went well...