The logical part of my brain says I should be really proud of myself. I had a lot to do today. While I didn't get it all done, I did accomplish a few things, including one that took some real sitting down and thinking it over concentration. Yet, for some reason, I just feel like I didn't do enough.
I did most of my reading for my website design class, all but the last couple pages. I took notes, both for the class, and for things that I can do to improve this site. I read all the classroom message board messages as of this morning, and I think I can do the three lesson assignments by friday without problem.
I didn't tackle the Fiction writing class assignment of creating a character for the story that will be my class project, but I kept up with my study group's messages, visited another group member's site and read a bit of her writing, and tried to come up with an idea for what kind of story I want to write. It's a start...
Mom and I went to Wally World this morning too, and I found a decoupage kit of sunflowers, and bought a wooden picket fence design box (about the size to hold cassette tapes, or maybe a few four inch potted plants), and started painting part of it... I couldn't find some of my paints, so I couldn't do the long fence-style sides, since I wanted a white picket fence.
I also resisted temptation and left Sim City 3000 on the shelf when I found it in the electronics department; its minimum processor requirement is almost twice what I have, and I don't have the disk space for it anyway. I'm rather proud of myself for that; usually when I see a computer game I want, I grab it then and there and plunk down the plastic.
This afternoon, I saw a message on the Journals list about a neat little addition to links in IE. By setting a TITLE attribute within a link, you can make a tooltip pop up when you leave the cursor over a link for a moment. Since the scripting program I use to maintain my site does the links automatically, I had to figure out a way to get it to add the title attribute, and after a couple failed attempts, I succeeded. If you're using IE 4 or greater and want to see it in action, go back to the main page and let the cursor hover over one of the dates in the calendar table (or try it on the link in this paragraph). Kinda cool, I thought.
Let's see... what else did I do today? I typed up yesterday's journal entry and got it posted, I kept up with the e-mail that came in, oh and I found the floor under my office chair... it was getting pretty badly cluttered. I can see my desktop again too. So all in all, I think I did fairly well. What I didn't accomplish today will still be waiting tomorrow, right? Yes, I'm starting to feel a little better about my achievements.
Windows really gave me a fright earlier tonight.... I downloaded DirectX 6.1 from WindowsUpdate last week, and since then I've had the occasional glitch. It really gave Jev some headaches with his computer, and so he's reinstalled Windows, removed most of IE, and hasn't even touched Windows Update and won't until he's sure his system is stable, and has a backup of it.
I thought I was just having minor little problems.... my system clock loses time when I'm doing processor intensive stuff ... it lost about 20 minutes or more yesterday while I was doing various things, though once I rebooted, it reset itself to the proper time... but tonight I landed on a page with Crescendo embedded, and that's when all heck broke loose!
I was talking to Jev in Netmeeting at the time, and since it was MIDI, it started playing over him, and I immediately scrolled down to try to find the midi and turn it off, so I could hear him again. I found the Crescendo display, but it said it was waiting for the MIDI device. Huh??
I backed off the page as fast as I could, and IE started redrawing erratically... it couldn't manage to finish completely redrawing, and the navigation icons would flash in and out of view. Uh oh.... So I shut IE down, thinking that would take Crescendo and the MIDI and all the flashing with it.
Then the icons on my desktop started flashing, and all my other windows had problems redrawing. As if that wasn't enough, the music didn't stop, either. I couldn't get Eudora to close, I couldn't hear Jev for all the cacophony, and I thought my system had contracted some strange virus or something. But it was a page that belonged to a friend of mine, and I knew she'd never intentionally do that to anyone.
I eventually gave the system a three finger salute to get it rebooted (I couldn't even get into my SoundBlaster control panel to reset the MIDI, because it couldn't finish drawing), and once I did that, everything was just fine. But now I'm surfing in fear of hitting another page with embedded MIDI, and I think that I'm going to wind up reinstalling Windows sometime this week, because -- guess what? -- you can't uninstall DirectX 6.1. Fudge!
I'm ready to take aim at Bill Gates with the biggest SuperSoaker I can find. Anyone else want to join me? I'll see you in my dreams, it's time for me to get to bed!
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