And then Apple filed a lawsuit...

I was, for the longest time, one of the larger nay-sayers when it came to, well, everything to do with Apple. I didn't like their file system, I didn't like their computer design, I didn't like their iPods, or even their name. How dare they sour the good word "apple." And what is the deal with e-ver-y-thing being prefixed with a lowercase I?

Then, I started actually using an eMac (the downscaled, economy, eggshell-shaped style of desktop introduced after OS X came out) for my high school journalism class, and found out that Apple wasn't the red-eyed demon I had always thought it was. As a matter of fact, it was more than just usable. It was, dare I say it, intuitive.

And so college rolled around, and I found myself in possession of a pretty large sum of money, which I used to buy a replacement for my laptop. It was deathly slow, you see. Having dealt with both PCs and Macs, and with the advent of the Intel processor under the hood of every new Mac, which allowed for the installation of Windows on Macs, I decided that I could get a Mac and then have the best of both operating systems (which is to say, I could have intuitive stuff on the Mac side, and computer games on the Windows side).

And for a while, I was a fan of Mac. Apple made some darn fine computers, even if their iPod was nowhere near as useful or fully-featured as other MP3 players on the market. And sure, my Zen Vision:M couldn't exactly interface with my new computer, but I had ways of working around that as long as I was near people with a Windows computer.

Then Apple announced the iPhone, and it was sweet, but it was highly unaffordable, and came with a mandatory plan with AT&T, which makes the whole thing even more unaffordable.

Then Apple came out with the iPod Touch, which was like the iPhone, only stripped of the phone plan and, for some reason, several of the really handy applications that weren't phone-centric, like email, Google Maps, and Notes.

Still, I bought an iPod Touch on the grounds that it finally had something that no other MP3 player could replicate: Internet. And it was a good buy, especially because it interfaced with my iMac. But it still couldn't do everything I wanted it to as easily as I wanted it to. Case in point: email, Google Maps, and Notes.

Enter the countless number of people who have worked to hack the iPhone (and concordantly, the iPod Touch), which brings us to this point...



This will only last until Apple releases their first-party SDK and people can install Apple-approved applications on their iPhones/Pod Touches, but I love it. I'm quite giddy at this point, but soon that should evaporate into recognizing the usefulness of these applications for everything they're worth.

Lunacy and lunarcy

It is often a practice of mine to do things that I have absolutely no intention of revisiting, even though they're incredibly funny or poignant at the time that I do them. A very recent example of this -- now invalidated by my talking about it on my blog -- is the night of Arabian Nights rehearsal during which I spread water on my butt while I was offstage because my character ran into the scene complaining about diarrhea. It was a stroke of genius brought on by my visit to the water fountain and my incredibly random nature.

Sitting in work-study today, I watched a few episodes of Scrubs, listened to a podcast from IGN Wii-k in Review (while I sat in reverie at the games coming out this and next year. We are looking at another shot at the gaming Golden Age right now), and tried many times to get my iPod to connect to the internet. Being that I'm sitting at the front desk's workstation right now, it's safe to say that my attempts failed.

The failure did, however, allow one of my iPod's more interesting features to shine through. The feature, you ask? My calendar.

While wholly spectacular inventions in and of themselves, calendars have been mostly overlooked by the general populous as simple chotchkies to be hung on the kitchen wall and ignored until you need to know what day or year it is for the check that you're writing. But the idea of extensible calendars, which allow for much more information than can fit in a 1 1/2 square-inch box, is bringing the practicality and -- let's face it -- fun back into having places to be at certain times of the day.

Perhaps one of the most interesting calendars of the non-extensible form, however, is the giant stone one located in Latin America, cradled in a Mayan ruin. The calendar gives proof that the Mayans were at least dilligent timekeepers, as it has on it the dates of lunar eclipses and other celestial happenings. But unfortunately for anybody visiting the Mayan ruins and wondering what the stars will be doing in 2011, the Mayan calendar only keeps up on such information until December 12, 2010: the day which the Mayans playfully describe as "the end of the world."

Having heard of this back in my junior or senior year of high school from a member of Bellevue East's forensics team, and having been exposed to stories of the calendar before then, I made, in a stroke of random whimsy, a schedule of events for December 12, 2010. I bring this up now, because the very same schedule somehow migrated from Google Calendar, where I first wrote it out, to my iPod's calendar, for me to stumble upon this afternoon. Here's what I've got myself doing:

12 AM - Panic
2:30 AM - Panic some more
6 AM - Spongebob Squarepants
9 AM - Eat breakfast at McDonalds
10 AM - Panic
1 PM - Late lunch
2 PM - Prayer
3 PM - Prayer
4 PM - Prayer
5 PM - The Simpsons
6 PM - Prayer
7 PM - Prayer
8 PM - Work on forensics piece
9 PM - Buy a hammer
10 PM - Build sculpture of Campbell (my forensics coach)
10:30 PM - Destroy sculpture of Campbell
11 PM - Panic and pray

In my exceptional genius, I planned out this schedule and excluded an hour for eating dinner. I'm sure I had a reason at the time for why I don't eat any kind of final meal, maybe in reverence to all of the foods that I should have tried by this point but hadn't, maybe in a kind of observance to God that I'm not full unless I have Him dwelling inside me, or maybe it was just because I knew that I probably wouldn't be hungry that night. In any case, why would it take me an hour to find and buy a hammer?

Blogging from bed

I'm sitting in front of my computer, typing this out on my iPod, not because it's fun to do so (though it is pretty fun), but rather because my computer can't connect to the internet and my iPod can. Oh, there goes the internet on my computer.

Okay, now I'm on my bed. Typing this out on my iPod. And this thing is just amazing. It holds all of my music (that I listen to), most of my movies (which I can swap out when I feel so inclined), and more amazingly, I'm typing this blog out on it. I'm logged on to the Internet with my iPod (which knows what I meant to type when I accidentally hit a wrong button or two on its keyboard.

But that I'd only a pre-tangent to what I want to write about today. See, I was listening to my music after classes this morning, and I don't think it's uncommon to feel like your music know how you feel and finds the appropriate songs to bolster whatever feeling you're ... well, feeling.

My iPod takes it a step further, and seems to predict what I'm about to feel (just like it predicts what I'm about to type). Let me run down the situation: I frequently listen to this thing now that I have it, and lemme get this out of the way, I don't have that many love songs. At all. I'd say most of my music is general rock affair, with maybe an eighth of it being love songs. I also have roughly 500 songs on here. An eighth of 500 is 62, which I just figured out on this thing's calculator.

Of that, it seems that this thing knows when I'm ABOUT to run into somebody I like. Because it'll start playing an appropriate song before we even cross each other's paths.

And this is another one of those mysteries of life that I just have no clue as to what I'm supposed to make of this. Is this God? Is this Satan? Is this just my imagination or mind or heart or whatever department it is that handles this kind of thing in my body? Who is playing this joke on me, and for what audience?

And more importantly, what do I do? I've already made a move, way back ago, and it didn't end well. So my natural instinct is to just let this all slide and forget that it ever happened (happens). But what if that's the wrong move? Would I know what an idiot I was? Or would by hoping that things can move forward and making the same move twice would I be made all the bigger a fool for not realizing my folly the first time?

I say this now to represent my despair: Grah.

My iPod's been Shanghaied

Literally. It's been shipped from Shanghai today. This is possibly the worst piece of news I could get this week.  Muuh...

Goodness, I feel miserable.

My feeling miserable has nothing to do with that.  I just like it for its stupidity.

No, I feel terrible because I have a headache, I'm having hot flashes (which the hoodie seems to have a dissipating effect on, ironically), and I had threesies on the toilet five times today.  I know, it's an uncomfortable thought, but more uncomfortable is having to deal with it.

I went to the doctor's office today, for three reasons: first, my toenail, which was ingrown at the end of last semester, cut out, and is now growing in... ingrown.  Second, the threesies.  And third, these incredibly frequent bouts of dizziness I've been having recently, which have usually been accompanied by a headache in some region of my skull, and was disturbingly close to my brain stem yesterday.  The doctor gave me a prescription for antibiotics for the toenail, and told me that the dizziness couldn't be resolved until we got the toenail and the threesies under control.  I feel like that makes sense, since an infection can affect every part of your body, and dehydration can lead to a vast array of noggin-related symptoms.  So tomorrow I go to get that prescription filled out, and I get everything else straightened out, too.

Oh, and my iPod had better be here, if FedEx knows what's good for it.

Today pretty much rocks.

Last night, I got an email from UNL on the subject of transferring and enrolling. Well, the email was mostly about the Math Placement Exam I need to take at the New Student Enrollment day I'll be attending, but it did catch my intrigue, being the first time I heard news of even needing to attend a New Student Enrollment day. So I did some digging on the subject, and it turns out that in preparation for one of the four dates they have for new students to enroll (10/19/2007, 11/16/2007 12/14/2007, and 1/10/2008), I need to pay them $150 and $10 for each guest on this enrollment day, decide on 6 or 7 courses I would like to register for, fill out a health profile that describes my immunizations and such, and take the aforementioned Math Placement Exam. This is funtime, because it means that I'm very likely to need still more math credits once I get to UNL, and I have no clue what classes I'll need to take, nor do I have any idea what my immunization record is like. The upshot of this is that I'm going to be missing class on the 19th.

In other news, I sent a second email to Fred #6, who sent the previous reply to me, calling me a little girl. That message, and the correspondence henceforth, can be seen here. It feels as though that might be the last I hear from Fred #6 regarding my question about the Minneapolis bridge, but it was a good test of my argumentative skills, and of my patience with difficult people. Yeay.

More glorious than that, though, is the news that my iPod Touch, originally thought to be shipping from a warehouse on Friday and arriving here next Tuesday, has in fact shipped this Tuesday and is set to arrive here this Friday.

I was so excited at the news of this, that I ran to the Perry so that I could tell somebody. I didn't run into anybody who knew how eagerly I was anticipating this baby's delivery, but rest assured the labor had me gasping for a good long time after the fact.

And so now we come to this afternoon, in which it would behoove me to both exercise and to read the news on my Wii. The exercise is important because I need to exercise, and the news-reading is really only for my photojournalism and American Government classes. I don't think anybody ever gets any real benefit from reading the news.