My external hard drive started clicking today.  I’m working on copying the files over to the desktop Dave is giving me (because he’s an awesome boyfriend), but I’m still annoyed that this product I purchased from a reputable company has started going bad only 18 months out of the gate.  I’ve still got 3 years left on the warranty, but I can’t RMA the drive until it actually stops working - according to their diagnostic tool there is nothing wrong with my drive.  Until it quits for good I’m stuck with a drive I don’t trust.

I had a hard drive fail on my desktop computer back in 8th grade, so I learned the lesson about how important it is to back up your shit pretty early on.  That’s why there was no reason to panic when my ThinkPad T40 quit working last spring — everything I really REALLY care about is already stored safely in one or more additional places.  (Though it was still very inconvenient to suddenly be without a functioning computer.)

Some people, tech-savvy people, set up their computers with RAID arrays and whatnot.  I don’t know that much about computers and I don’t really care to learn - I want the technology to make my life easier and that’s it.  So I’m constantly looking for better ways to take care of my important files.  I think it’s overkill to back up every kB of data I ever interact with, so I’m happy to manage the things I would miss in the event of a hardware failure.

So here’s what I’m currently doing.

1. Pictures:  Pictures are my most valuable data in that they are completely unreplaceable.  I can’t rebuy or redownload memories, so I take this one seriously.  My standard practice has been to keep a copy on my primary computer (Thinkpad, until recently), another copy on my external hard drive (yeah, that’s going bad now too), and I sometimes even burn them on CD-Rs.  Last year I decided I wanted more backedupness (good thing, too, since methods 1 and 2 are both failing on me), and I bought a year subscription to Flickr.com.  The site boasts easy sharing and organization tools, but I most like that it lets you upload and store your images at full resolution.  For about $25/yr you get unlimited uploads and storage.
2. Word/Excel/etc Documents: These generally get saved on my local computer and a usb thumb drive while I’m working on them.  I often email drafts to myself in gmail or upload them to my mit locker, as much for convenience of getting access on another computer as for backing up.  When I’m finished, if it’s something I care about, I’ll put another copy on my external hard drive.
3. Music: This is the one that still has me stumped, mostly because of the volume of material to be dealt with.  There is no flickr equivalent for music that I know of to easily store my music somewhere else.  I have a lot of pirated music from back in the day that would suck to lose, but it’s the legit stuff that I’ve bought over the past couple years that I would be saddest see disappear.  I buy most of my music these days, but I’m hesitant to spend money on digital copies of music unless I have a reliable way of ensuring I won’t lose all of it next time I have a string of hardware failures.  My current thinking is that CDs, easily ripped to computer, still offer the best combination of value & reliability for music.

Somebody told me I should write in this thing.  A month into summer, it seems clear to me that this blog was merely something I did to procrastinate when work seemed even less desirable than pouring my heart out to an internet full of strangers.  But since I’m being lazy this summer and don’t have much work at all to punt, this litttle project has fallen by the way-side.

I’ve been flexing my creative muscle since school got out.  I spent the first week of summer watching House and folding ridiculous modular origami.  I made several things out of a book by Tomoko Fuse (which I requested a while back from MIT libraries), but my favorite models were actually made using the “Penultimate Module” I found described by some guy from University of Tennessee.  The penultimate modules are simple to fold, easy to assemble, and the results are nice.  My biggest project so far was the truncated icosahedron, made with 90 modules, which has 12 pentagonal faces and 20 hexagonal faces.  Right now it’s hanging from my ceiling; here’s a grainy picture I took using flash in a dark room (Dave was sleeping), but you get the idea at least of what I was going for.

I’ve also been working a lot on piano the past couple weeks.  I took some lessons a long (LONG) time ago, but I quit in middle school when my parents had to sell the piano to get them through some tough financial times.  I’ve been playing a lot on my new keyboard; it’s got nice weighted keys and good piano sounds so it’s not too far off from playing the real thing.  With three (or more?) pianos in the building some people have questioned whether I really needed to spend a bunch of money on a keyboard, but I think it was worth it.  I practice a lot more with it so close by, and it allows me to play without feeling self-concious about the more experienced players (like coughing asian girl who constantly camps in Loop lounge) who would hear and judge my attempts if I were working on an acoustic piano.  I guess what it boils down to is that I don’t care about ever performing — I’m just in it for my own enjoyment.

Tomorrow we will be undergoing another postage hike.  First class stamps will now be 44c and postcards 28c, up from 42c and 27c respectively.  As somebody who sends a lot of mail, I find this irritating.  Does it really cost 5% more for them to deliver a postcard this year then it did last year?  100% more to deliver it now than it did when I was born (yeah, when first class stamps were 22c)?  They need to get their costs in check.

I do value the ability to send mail through the postal service, enough to pay it most of the time without much thought or complaint.  What pisses me off most right now is my realization that the introduction of the much-touted Forever Stamp is really just a tool for the USPS to get interest free loans from all the people running out to stock up on stamps before the rate increase.  The savings to the consumer is marginal in the short term and zero in the long term when you consider the other ways any money you might spend stocking up on Forever stamps might otherwise be used or invested.   But the USPS really benefits from having people run out and buy up stamps in advance, especially when you consider how many of those stamps will get lost in the shuffle over time and never redeemed.  The Forever Stamp also saves the USPS the cost of printing all those denominated stamps nobody will buy after they hike the rate.

I guess there’s nothing really wrong with what they’ve done here (aside from being inefficient and needing to raise rates so often in the first place), but I feel a little betrayed to realize that something I thought was done out of a desire to make things more convenient for postal customers has really just been about dollars and cents all along.

We’re all in the home stretch now, with less than three weeks left to go until summer break.  I decided a few weeks ago that I don’t want a UROP, or an internship, or any other major responsibilities this summer.  I want to rest up and do some of the things that I want to do.  However, I think it’s important to do a little planning, lest I squander all my precious summer days on the internets and have nothing to show for it.

So, in no particualr order, here is a partial list of things I want to work on this summer:

• Hiking/Camping: ’nuff said.
• Music:  I need to learn to play this guitar I just bought.
• Writing:  I’ve been kicking around a lot of ideas for short stories or poems, some autobiographical and some not.  I want to flesh some of them out.
• Art: so I’m not normally the artistic type, but I had a surprisingly good time working on recent procrastination projects so I might do some other stuff if I feel moved to do so.  (See robot postcard and Pythagoras tree.)
• Cleaning:  I can’t stand it anymore, so a deep and thorough room cleaning is probably the first thing I’ll do once I’m done with the semester.
• Thesis:  I need a thesis project for next year, and I currently have no idea what I’m going to do it on.  I get sad just thinking about it.
• PE points: I need them.  I’m thinking about doing Group Exercise classes where you basically pay to have somebody sign your workout timecard.

That’s already a pretty long list, and I’m sure I’ll think of more things.  Summer isn’t long enough to fit them all in, probably.

I bought a guitar this week.  It was an impulse buy, sort of, which is something I normally try to avoid.  I’ve thought about getting one for a long time now, so when I happened upon MusiciansFriend.com earlier this week and saw that many guitars were on sale for 30-50% off I thought, “What the heck?”  So I clicked BUY.  I prefer to think of it as saving $150 instead of spending $150.

Isn’t it pretty?

Can I play anything?  No, not yet.  Today I learned how to tune it to itself and how to play an A major chord (thanks, Furry).  Now my fingers hurt because I have no calluses.  You’re probably thinking that this whole thing is a dumb waste of money, but I think there are enough other guitar newbs on Destiny to keep me interested long enough to get past the initial frustration of not knowing how to play anything. 

For the first time since freshman year, I’m worried that I might actually fail a class.  Biology, that institute requirement I’ve heard upperclassmen bitch and moan about since first arriving at MIT, has finally come around to bite me.  It’s not a difficult course by MIT standards; I mean, so far I’ve managed passing or near-passing performances on most things without attending any classes or recitation or office hours.  Instead, I’ve spent the night before each exam looking over pset solutions (for psets I barely attempted the first time around) and browsing relevant chapters of the bio textbook.  I know this isn’t a good strategy, but that’s what makes this class difficult;  I have no interest and no motivation to do anything—anything, no matter how small—for this class, so it suddenly becomes hard to pull out a decent grade.

I can’t remember ever feeling this apathetic about coursework.  Ever.  It worries me.  I used to be one of those kids in high school who would do extra credit assignments in a class I already had a perfect grade in. Yes, I was a world-class overacheiver.  I think the truth is that I cared more then about the naive notion of achieving excellence; I believed it was possible to be truly excellent at something and that it was always a goal worth pursuing.  Even if nobody else saw it, I felt pride at my ability to do things well and I liked being that self-motivated student that everyone said would do great things.

MIT changed that part of me.  It didn’t take long here to figure out that I could kill myself trying to be great at everything, but no matter what I do I will never be perfect or even merely above average at most things that go on at this school.  I’ve never impressed anyone here.  Maybe it’s just that I’ve become more concious of my academic interests and what’s actually worth investing time in, but somewhere along the way I lost that part of myself that cared about doing things just for the sake of doing them.

Now I ask first: WHY am I doing this? I still feel guilty about doing so poorly, even if mastery of introductory biology is completely irrelevant to my future, but the nagging questions of why leave me without the motivation to push through the monotony like I would have when I was younger.

Updated to add: The course administrator wrote back and told me that I was in no danger of failing, but that I would probably get a C in the class if I didn’t rock the final.  I think I’m okay with that.

Have you ever heard a song that, when you heard it, just spoke to your soul?  That happened to me today.  I was walking along this afternoon with my iPod on shuffle when Dan Wilson’s Free Life came on. I’ve heard the song before, but I guess I never really listened to it.  The lyrics really capture some of the things I’ve been thinking about this week.

A better title for this post might be Yet another emo entry, but that wouldn’t be in keeping with my naming convention.  Maybe this is me crying for attention, or maybe this is just me venting.  Maybe you shouldn’t read this at all.

Isn’t it amazing how strongly we are affected by our interactions with others?  The tone and the manner in which something is said can make us soar.  Happiness, elation, satisfaction… all from one wanted glance.  But when they look away, or when they don’t look at all, we assume there is something wrong with us — that we are the reason they are not looking, saying, being what we want them to be.  

In general I try not to do this because I know it’s not a healthy way of dealing with stuff, but the cumulative events of the week have left me feeling defective.  Chapter 4 needs a complete overhall you say?  And my figures need to be recolored?  Fine, my mistake.  You want me to put my clothes on?  Okay, I guess… maybe later. My playful pokes are annoying?  Really?

Okay.  I guess it’s me.  It’s all me.  I’m the one with a fucking problem here, right?  It’s not you guys being overly critical, working through your own problems, or just being mean.  No, not at all.   That is not it, at all.

P.S. I can hear the mice.  Oh, there goes one!  They always come out when I’m sitting here alone.  It’s like I’m not even here.

I changed a few things. Comments welcome.

RAINDROPS

How far to fall? And how soon?
The Sun recedes before high noon.
Will I light upon the land 
And nourish those as yet unplanned,
From seed to tree I’d help them grow
So in their green my life would show?
Or will I crash upon the waves, 
Ever dilute in wat’ry graves
Where shadow lives and nothing more,
Our stories drownd by ocean’s roar?
Is it over yet, key choices made?
Will I know when you begin to fade?
Sun, oh Sun! Don’t leave me here;
The lonely dark and cold draws near.
Let’s cling together, you and I,
I’ll reach for you across the sky.
I’ll fear no end if you’ll hold my glance,
My only comfort - your friendly trance.