I went to my workplace to get a little bit of work done and to set up a computer on the network that would act as a shared drive manager. The getting a little bit of work done part went by quickly, but the setting up a computer on the network didn’t.

I noticed that we had three Dell compact computers in a locked storage room in the back of the office. At first, I decided to try one of these computers – it didn’t really matter how old they were or how bad the processor was, the only thing that was important was that it would connect to the Internet, and that it had plenty of USB ports.

I grabbed the desktop at the top and brought it over to my work area to plug it in to a monitor, mouse, and keyboard to set it up. Oddly, the computer turned on but didn’t send any signal at all to the monitor. I tried restarting it a few times but it still didn’t work. I unplugged the computer and brought it back to the storage room to exchange it with a different computer.

The next computer powered on properly and I could see the Dell loading logo on the monitor, but when it started loading the operating system, the screen went black. Again, I tried restarting it a few times, but it didn’t work. I brought it back to the storage room to exchange it with the last remaining computer, hoping that the third time was a charm.

It wasn’t. The last computer was worst – it powered on but sent nothing to the monitor, and just kept beeping.

At this point I’m obviously frustrated because all three computers aren’t working, and there was obvi­ously no point in keeping these computers if they’re broken but somebody did anyway.

Then, on a side table, I find another Dell desktop. This one isn’t a compact one, but it looked less dusty than the other ones, so I decided to try this one out. Miraculously, it works. Unmiraculously, the Inter­net doesn’t work.

I spent about two hours going back and forth from the Dell computer to my computer trying to find out what the problem could possibly be. I downloaded tons of different drivers trying to find out what the problem was. I even considered reinstalling the operating system, or installing a different version of the operating system.

The I finally figured out what the problem was.

I had to move the ethernet cable to a different port.

So Far in 2011…

Number of Taco Bell tacos eaten: 24

Number of times I did my own laundry: 3

In reference to my blog post from April 10, I think that I acquired some sort of allergy for warm weather. For the past two days, it’s been chillier than it was three days ago, and my cold symptoms didn’t worsen. Then suddenly, it got warm again today, and now I’m really tired and my cold symptoms are worsening.

In other news, I don’t think I mentioned this in my blog before, but my workplace has been having some issues with thefts lately, starting from this academic semester. One of the staff members actually used our office as his apartment/home last semester so very few people had the opportunity to be alone in the office and steal anything, but the resident staff member graduated at the end of the previous semester. Since then, things have been randomly disappearing.

One of the things that disappeared was a microphone. This particular microphone has been driving me crazy, because every time I go to use it, it disappears. Then, after a while, it randomly reappears, or someone says that they took it (without notifying me) and returns it.

As of yesterday, this microphone was missing, but it randomly appeared on my desk today.

So if you happen to be the person who had it and returned it, and you read my blog, then thanks for returning the microphone. If you happen to be the person who stole it and decided to return it, and you read my blog, then you made the right choice. If you’re a ghost that took the microphone and decided to return it, and you read my blog, please don’t take it again. I really need it.

So Far in 2011…

Number of Taco Bell tacos eaten: 24

Number of times I did my own laundry: 3

THIS IS A TRAGEDY.

I enroll for Fall 2011 courses at my university tomorrow at 9:30 PM. The only problem is, the most important courses that I wanted to enroll in are full.

To make up for the fullness, I selected other courses, which happen to inevitably be morning courses. After frustratingly organizing my classes until my brain almost exploded, I ended up having morning classes on every day.

My previous schedule had me starting no earlier than 11 AM on each day of the week. Now, I start at 8:00 AM on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and at 8:50 AM on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

Most of you are probably calling me a wimp for not being able to wake up decently early and calling this a tragedy, but the problem is that I work during the night. I generally arrive at the office of my workplace at 10 PM and stay there until about 2 AM. By the time I go to sleep, it could be as late as 3 AM. If I wake up at 7 AM the following morning to make it to class, I would only be able to sleep four hours during the night.

Sure, I can do this for a few days, but I can’t survive like this for an entire semester. People have already suggested that I sleep in during the weekends or take naps during the day, but that can only be done so much, and doing that on such irregular intervals will end up being detrimental to my health. Also, not getting enough consecutive sleep will ultimately make the sleep that you take less effective, because you never enter the deeper stages of your sleep cycle.

My solution? It sounds lame, but I think the best way to solve this problem is for me to change my working hours from the night to the extremely early morning. For those of you who don’t know, I work at a newspaper company, and my in-office job is to make sure all the articles get published on the website.

If I sleep at 9 PM and wake up at 5 AM, I can get eight hours of continuous sleep and be able to catch the 5:43 AM bus to go to the office and finish my work before most other people wake up.

If I end up doing that, I’ll feel like an elementary schooler by going to sleep at 9 PM. -___-

So Far in 2011…

Number of Taco Bell tacos eaten: 24

Number of times I did my own laundry: 3

I made $200 in 6 hours today by participating in a psychology experiment. If you don’t want to do the calculation by yourself, that’s $33.33 an hour. I wish I could participate in psychology experiments as a full-time job for eight hours a day and five days a week – if all the experiments were like the one that I did today, I would be making about $70,000 a year before taxes.

The beginning of the day involved sitting in a dark room in front of a computer screen with images flashing in front of me. I placed three fingers of my right hand on the 1, 2, and 3 keys on the keyboard and rated the images as negative, neutral, or positive.

That seemed easy and innocent until they started showing me pictures of mutilated faces with crusted blood, a woman who appeared to have the world’s worst case of breast cancer, a police officer standing over a shot body, and slaughtered horses on a field.

After that, I moved on to a separate room where I played a handful of games involving probability and gambling. During one of the games, I realized that instead of putting effort into trying to guess the correct answer, I would end up getting just as many points from the game by randomly guessing.

I think the game was rigged, because out of the eight or so trials that I randomly guessed on, I got them all wrong.

After that, I had some lunch while filling out some questionnaires, then played a few more games involving economics and sight. Finally, the hardest part came up.

The experimenters put a net over my head that was supposed to measure brain wave activity. The problem was that the net had about a hundred or so nodes, and it had to be put into salt water so they would stick properly to my scalp and pick up all the activity. Putting the actual thing on my head took an extremely long time, then I had to do eight trials of an activity that takes seven to eleven minutes for each trial.

I think the reason I got paid so much is because of how frustratingly uncomfortable that last part was.

So Far in 2011…

Number of Taco Bell tacos eaten: 24

Number of times I did my own laundry: 2

THE INTERNET IN MY APARTMENT IS BROKEN AGAIN.

AARGH.

Fortunately, I work at a place where I can come and go freely with a 25 mbps Internet connection, so I went to the Badger Herald office so I didn’t have to sit in my apartment Internetless or have to go to a library and have people staring at me for typing too loudly.

My desktop computer at the office has three hard drives, one that holds Windows 7 and one that is used as a network storage device. The third hard drive is empty, so I decided to install a Mac operating system on it because one of my co-workers who is planning on joining me in leading multimedia refuses to use any editing software other than Final Cut Pro.

Even though Sony Vegas Pro 10 is almost just as good.

If you ever decide to try this as well, keep this advice in mind:

Popping in a Mac OS installation disk and booting from the CD/DVD drive will not work. It will try to read the disk for a while, fail, then continue on booting from the hard drive.

If you managed to get on Google and started searching for solutions, don’t use the solutions that require you to boot from .dmg or .pkg files. You need to already have a Mac in order to read those files.

If you end up downloading files and burning them to your own DVDs and trying to install Mac OS clones, don’t. Your optical drive will most likely fail because the files are too large and the installation will die when there’s 10 minutes remaining.

If you are intelligent enough to realize that burning these files to a USB drive instead will eliminate that problem, also don’t. I spent ten minutes clicking around on PowerISO and searching Google to find out how to make a USB drive act like a CD and found nothing.

At that point, I got frustrated, quit, and went to Taco Bell.

So Far in 2011…

Number of Taco Bell tacos eaten: 24

Number of times I did my own laundry: 2

Today was a day of MASS CHAOS BECAUSE THE STATE OF WISCONSIN HAD ELECTIONS and I happen to work as the web director for a newspaper that’s starting to focus on improving its website and taking advantage of the Internet.

After I got back from my classes, most of my evening and my entire night was spent sitting in front of my computer at the office refreshing pages and reading emails to put out live coverage of the election on BadgerHerald.com.

Yes, that’s right. The statistics don’t update themselves. There is literally a person there manually put­ting in all the numbers and updating the page over and over again as the information becomes available.

We made a special page for the election, and if you want to check that out, you can find it at http://badgerherald.com/elections. It’s probably going to be dormant by the time you read this and click on the link, but it’s probably worth visiting anyway seeing as I spent a handful of hours constantly updating those pages. Also, depending on when you look at it, the Supreme Court results still might not be finalized, as it was still extremely close when I left the office (meaning, there were almost 1.5 million votes total and the difference between the two candidates was about 600 votes).

As a result of all this, I’m extremely tired and my eyeballs hurt from staring into a pair of monitors for a majority of my time at the office. … Not that I’m not already spending too much time staring at monitors and screens in the first place, but it’s a lot more straining when you’re trying to work as quickly as possible and your eyes are flying across the breadth of the monitors.

So Far in 2011…

Number of Taco Bell tacos eaten: 21

Number of times I did my own laundry: 2