Oh, good. Just a couple more days and I’m done with speech class. Thank God! With luck, I should never have to attend another one. Don’t get me wrong, the class went fine. It’s the technology, the constant assignments, and everything else.

Today, I ended up having to burn $80 I was saving on one of my insulins (Lantus). I lost my medicaid on New Years day and to be honest, until today, I really didn’t give a damn. Medicaid was giving me nothing but grief anyway. But damn -! $89 God, burning that much money on such a tiny vial of liquid.

Y’know, world, a new pair of jeans would be nice, so would a pair of shoes. Maybe a new jacket, I’m wearing the same winter coat I did back when I was 18. Hey — here’s a revolutionary idea — howzabout a suit I could interview in? POOF. Insulin.

Yeah, I know… it’s stupid to be crying over this. I need insulin to survive. I can live without clothes. In another week or so, I should be getting a student refund check in the mail. I know this is just PMS making me feel all weird over something as stupid as this.

But now I just want to cry.

Okay, I promised an update regarding the move and here it is.

I’m still a bit ambivalent about this whole move. A large part of me will be intensely glad to be out of Alpine Meadows, but another part is still waiting for the next shoe to fall.

Parkwood Green accepted our application (they don’t do credit checks, in fact crime seems to be the only thing they’re concerned with) and the bank went through on financing.

The (new) trailer was moved into the park yesterday, though the crew almost got into an accident on the way over. We had a sudden snow squall go through, which reduced visibility to almost zero. Apparently some lady hit the breaks unexpectedly, a semi swerved to avoid her and almost hit our trailer. However nothing happened and they finally made it into the spot… only to discover our water line had broken during the night. ^^;

Mom visited this morning on the way home and saw that everything is hooked up now, which should mean we can begin moving our stuff in. I’m still not sure which room I’m taking, but we can hash that out when we can actually move in.

The only other ugly thing is that we’re going to have to rent a power-washer to clean the trailer once it gets warm and the shed is full of garbage from the previous owner. >_> But that’s not too bad, considering.

Trudy, the owner of Cedar Mobile Home Service, is a miracle-worker. I swear. She’s taken care of all the permits, phone calls, even managed to talk a building inspector to give us a permit on his day off. Right now it’s looking like we’ll be able to live in the new trailer Monday or Tuesday. Trudy is good, let me tell you.

Another bad thing is that we couldn’t stay with Comcast. They don’t offer service in Sparta, even though it looks like they’re only a mile away. *sighs* Bye-bye anime, Food Network, and Avatar: The Last Airbender.

Anyroad, we’re going to take a load of junk to the trailer today and then we’re going out with Jodi tomorrow to pick out new appliances. (Note to self, turn Amazon store to vacation and get financial aid papers filled out!)

In other news, my main blog can now be set to friends only! (Haha!) I knew there had to be a plug-in to do this. ^_^

Instead of trying to inform everyone who needed the password, I can just send them logon information and be able to set things just like I can do on LiveJournal.

I just know I have some pretty weird people checking out my blog and I wanted a better way to protect sensitive entries. This is still my online diary, afterall. Yes, I want to share with my friends and family, but I don’t necessarily want my classmates reading my health-related posts. (or rants full of obscenities.)

Don’t worry, this isn’t going 100% friends only. I was just looking for a better way to protect posts to varying degrees.

Just a quick update to mention the new theme I’m uploading. This is in no way indicative that I’m done with the move; I’m just uploading my final project for my Web design class. It was basically complete a couple weeks ago, but I just hadn’t bothered to move it from my college Web site to this one.

It’s going to be weird for a bit, so please bear with me.

I promise I’ll write more about the move tomorrow or Saturday. Right now I’m really too exhausted to do much more than mindless Web design. (Yeah, I’ve picked a good major when I can do it this tired! XD)

Thanks

What is it about Asian men with long hair that I find so attractive? I saw a guy about my age at the FIA today, long hair and wearing a long, brown leather coat. Behold — I practically start drooling. Pathetic, ne? ^_~

Classes are killing me, but I had several key questions answered today. Great, but they were answered with conflicting viewpoints. So my simple questions spawned about 30 more each. *sigh* I’ll write more about them when I have my homework done and have greymatter to donate to pondering the ponderable.

I start grinning when I hear the Ranma 1/2 theme. I love the theme, but yet I haven’t seen a single episode. But it made my day hearing it, so I’m not questioning a good thing.

Our Trailer sold in 3 weeks, with closing in March. The hell?? 2 years for a house, 3 weeks for a trailer. Yes, what the hell sums up my thoughts.

I completely agree with the classic thought about lawyers and attorneys.

Do NOT come to my house after 9pm without calling first. I don’t care if I’m living in a mansion or a cardboard box. I come from a family of cops and an unsolicited knock on my door at that hour is sure to scare the shit out of me. So spare your life and just don’t do it. Kthxbye

*sighs*

Tall, dark, handsome… with hair better than mine. *sigh* Yes, thou art mine weakness!

Look for a new layout soon. Yes, my first actual Web Design class is being spent making a new blog layout. Ph34r me and my l33t Dreamweaver skills! Yes… my precious… *strokes*

Well, as you may have gathered from Jasson’s journal everything is still more or less going okay.

I really need to find out why I’m so quick to panic. I have two weeks where I’m fine; the picture of calm. And then suddenly I find myself either panicking or pissed off for absolutely no reason whatsoever. >_> *sighs* Basically, if I write a post where I’m super panicked, please don’t take me too seriously. You’ll know if it’s serious if Jasson says something.

….

We’re almost done with fall semester and then we have a bit before Winter semester begins. I’m passing my graphics class with flying colors, though relearning HTML has been a bit of a challenge. I haven’t done any nested table layouts in years… which means I am seriously out of practice. In my final assignment for that chapter, I couldn’t figure out how to get one of the inner tables to align properly. I’ve never been particularly skilled at forms either, so that gave me trouble too. The most forgiving chapter yet has been frames (wow!) and CSS (duh.) XD

However, my absolute lowest moment came when I had to make a CSS map. It was supposed to have little boxes that would appear on top of the map when you moused over the corresponding landmark. I would get one part working and then everything I’d done before would die on me. I finally got it working in MSIE, but the damn thing wouldn’t work in Firefox. Only after I turned it in did I find out I was one character away from making them work.

I wrote:

#point01
{ CSS goes here }

but I had to write:

#point01 A
{ Same CSS goes here}

I forgot to put that “A” at the end of the CSS declaration, which tells browsers that the spot is also a link. >_< Since Firefox is a bit more strict than MSIE, it didn't understand what I was doing.

Other than that, school is going pretty well. I’ll be glad when this semester is over, but I’m not looking forward to next semester either. I’m going to have about $400 - $500 worth of books I’ll need to purchase for just four classes.

I swear these publishers must be bandits. That much money for books is simply outrageous. Though I suppose I should be happy; since once I walked out of the bookstore at CMU once with $800 worth of books and supplies. All the same, I’d really prefer not to have to pay that much or tack that much onto my student loans.

I also recently discovered that I’m probably going to need to either buy more space for Lunaescence or simply buy another space for my graphics. I released two skins for the eFiction script last month and the downloads are simply killing my bandwidth. It took me a bit to figure it out, since I kept having hack attempts all last month. (More on that below.) Now that the chaos has calmed down, I can clearly see the suckage is coming from those two files. >_>

It seems strange (and almost flattering) to see hits coming from Web sites in Germany, France, Italy and know they’re using my eFiction skins. Seems even stranger when I look at my inbox and see all the requests for custom layouts and advice on how we did some things.

Part of me really is amazed by the reaction, but the other part of me keeps thinking “What in the world have I gotten myself into?”

Anyway, yeah… hack attempt. Last month, a guy in Italy released a full disclosure of eFiction’s security vulnerabilities and how to exploit them. I mean right down to the scripting they should use. Fake gif images, SQL injections, and remote scripting — oh my. So I had several hundred attempts to find “suntzu.php” in my non-existent author image folders, plus attempts to create directories, strange e-mails apparently generated by my script, and more. Lets just say the archive only looks the same. On top of the security patches Tammy released, I damn near changed the archive’s entire file structure.

All while trying to get all this homework done. XD I’ll say one thing, if those people did any service it was teaching me how to multi-task better. Though I just wish I could whittle down the modification requests, layout requests, and question e-mails so I could do a new layout for my blog and get the Christmas layout done for the main site.

I’m still very unsure of myself in this class. Again, I realize that I’m always my own worst critic and that I expect too much of myself. Part of me still is very intimidated by the entire idea of taking composition 102. I can safely say I learned things and that APA style did come back to me relatively quickly.

That being said, I’ve realized I dislike citing government publications — especially those found online. Our government makes things far harder than they need to be and insists on using the absolute longest names for their pages. I found myself becoming increasingly frustrated with the parenthetical reference — or “that little name and date you put immediately after a quote” as I explained to my mom in hopes of getting some direction. I eventually dug out my copy of “The College Writer” that Baker issued me for my College Success Strategies class, since they tell you how to cite organizations with long names. I hate the idea of plagiarism; much less being accused of it myself.

I think I wrote a decent essay, even with my many bad writing habits and confusion over the parenthetical references. I had to remove full paragraphs in order to keep the essay tight, especially since I feel so strongly over the idea of the chain letter and Internet hoax. Though I do hope my thesis came through okay and that I had at least some credibility. Hopefully over the next few weeks I can begin feeling more confident about those topics.