Dorienne's Log

This has absolutely nothing to do with writing or Christianity or anything I’ve talked about in recent months. This is just a personal achievement.

Sunday evening, I decided that it was time to up the RAM on my PC and went to Micro Center since theirs was the cheapest. I’d researched the type I wanted and how much I’d wanted to spend and had even factored the $30 that would be necessary for the folks at Micro Center to install said RAM for me come Monday morning.

Whether it was frugality, procrastination or just plain laziness, I never got to Micro Center on Monday and instead spent the night researching how install RAM. After watching no less than 10 videos on YouTube each describing the same process, I decided that this couldn’t be that difficult to up my RAM from 6 to 16GB and…this evening, I did it! The entire process took roughly 30-40 minutes when I include all the unplugging, looking up a last minute how-to video, saying a few prays about proper grounding for myself, the actual installation and the time praying as I waited for the PC to boot. All in all, not a bad way to spend an hour and voila!

This process was far too simple to seem this scare, what with the concept of grounding oneself and now my next project will be to revive my old Xbox from it’s purgatory of RROD. If life had Xbox achievements, there would be a “Ba-loop!” and a brief sign near the corner of my eye stating, “Install PC Component for the First Time 200G!”

As with many people, I have not been following politics as closely as I had pre-Nov 4, 2008, but every now and again, I run into things that just make me laugh out loud…in utter disgust.

First things first: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7829475.stm

Obama…you baffle me, too. I mean honestly! A liberal politician may walk around stating that he wants what is best for the “average American,” but when he says it from his vehicle that is more suited for the Gaza strip than a DC roadway and probably cost more (considering the absolute necessities like leather and maple interiors) than most “average Americans” will ever see in their lifetimes, the words are simply…blank, lifeless, hollow.

Now, I totally understand the necessity for having something safe tote around the man elected to the nation’s highest office, but must it be a Cadillac on top of the million plus dollars spent on making it drivable even with flat tires?

Nancy Pelosi has made me sick to my stomach for a long time. As a matter of fact, she irritated me even before I realized I was a Moderate and this just makes me dislike her even more. Nothing pisses me off more than to see people stepping into garbage about which they nothing in a wild attempt to maintain “popularity.” It is like choosing a tattoo in a parlour just because it looks cool without realizing that particular image has any cultural significance; in short, it’s just plain ignorant.

Most noteworthy quote of the article:

“The cats are very popular on the Internet, as is Rickrolling, and we thought this would be a way to bring some attention to it,” said Pelosi spokesman Brendan Daly.

You people don’t know your audience and, furthermore, you are attempting to meddle into affairs that are so beyond anything the “old-liberal-trying-to-stay-hip” set could possibly understand that you can’t even hear just how stupid you sound.

RickRolling is old news. It became old news when Astely got into the act (Link, and no, it’s not an intended RickRoll) and, as any self-respecting troller of the Interwebs knows, once an Internet meme grows so popular that the people who don’t spend every waking moment of their lives online know about it, it is no longer cool. Pelosi and her crew can’t possible see this and that is why they FAIL. A Pelosi RickRoll = Epic Fail.

Gah! Obama, quit pretending you are the great provider to the people whilest you are ferreted around in an unnecessarily “pimped out” car purchased with the hard-earned dollars of the Americans for whom you claim to be providing. Nancy Pelosi, all your Interwebs are belong to us, so STFU, GTFO and LOL! stop the charade, b/c we kno u liek dont kno nuthin; we all know you’re no different from any other old white woman trying to “understand” a culture that does not include or want her. Stop the madness, people! Stop it now!

Piggy-backing off of my YouTube milestone, I’ve hit a far more important one; two actually. This Tuesday past, I wrote my first 100,000 words in my novel Flight. Always the obsessive-compulsive writer, I actually narrowed down the 100,000th word…it was “felt” :). The second writing milestone was writing 200 pages worth of text. While the page count isn’t all that important because depending on how paragraphs flow and much of one page is simple dialogue, the hundred-thousand words most definitely is. Having no idea how big a book any word count would be, I compare everything to JK Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix as it is the only book that, for some reason, I’ve remembered its word count. OOTP is about 225,000 and the book is about 900 pages in the US, so I figure that I’ve written about nearly 400 pages, if Flight was ever a published novel. The idea of it just makes me laugh because I’m 400 pages into it and I’m only about a third of the way through the book. I know this thing is just going to be a beast.

The length of this book has got me thinking, though. I may end up being one of those Stephen King-ish, long-winded writers since the notes themselves for the novels are getting longer and longer. I guess I just have a lot to say, but I’m excited overall to see what others have to think about this, my first novel. My dream is that years from now, when I look back on my work, I’ll think to myself, “All the Newberrys notwithstanding, Flight was my first novel and therefore, will always be thought of as my greatest work.”

My YouTube video, Funny Quotes from the SVU hit 10,000 views today…

It’s not all that exciting since there are millions of YouTube videos with millions more views, but when looked at across all other SVU-related videos, mine has one of the highest viewcounts in relation to time spent on the site. There have been 10,000 views in a little more than three months…I’m not sure where, but somewhere in the world that’s got to count for something.

Why does Micro$oft have to put their hand in everything? It’s like Bill Gates sees something wonderful in the world and says, “What? A market that doesn’t make me richer in some way? Inconceivable!”

Consider the past five years of human evolution: Sony comes out with the Playstation; Microsoft says “me too” and comes out with the X-Box. MySpace erupts into a phenomenon; Gates comes up with Windows Live Spaces. The iPod becomes the greatest thing that has ever come from Apple, or ever will for that matter; Microsoft comes out with the Zune player, for no other reason than wanting a piece of another pie. Now, YouTube is becoming one of the greatest entities, or tragedies, depending on you look at it, to grace the internet. God knows how long before Gates wants to dig his hand in there too, if he hasn’t already. The entire idea of it makes me sick. If I only had the time and patience to discover Linux, I would drop Microsoft and everything it entailed.

I dream of a world where people are not just offered shoddy products and expected to buy them, just because they are offered. My thinking is that after this current generation, my generation, grows up a bit and raises our kids aware of how companies like Micro$oft just love to continue their monopolized marketing strategies, that the world will move away from nonsensical entities like Microsoft. Just imagine what the world could be like if we didn’t have people like Gates standing in the doorway of progress because he isn’t ready to take his piece of the pie yet.

All this ranting stems from this article. How on Earth can Gates say that copy protection is too complex for buyers when it is his company that does the most DRM?!? It’s mind boggling! Now that his Zune player might suffer from his self-imposed copyright protection, we suddenly have a problem. Blech! The whole thing makes me want to vomit all over myself.

Anyways, I’m down two pounds. Whoop-de-doo.