guided by a new era

Tomorrow, my family and I are leaving for New England. We will visit colleges and family. And we're driving through Canada to get there quickly. Tragic, I will wave in the general direction of Toronto when we get kind of close to it. Hopefully, we will have better luck coming back into the United States than last time. We went to some peninsula in Ontario for a day trip about a month after 9/11, and got stuck on the Ambassador Bridge for three hours coming back into Detroit because security was pretty much on every illegal narcotic known to mankind. And the bridge was swaying while we were on it and it freaked me out. Even though the bridge is supposed to do that.

Oh, and I got my new laptop. Dell Inspiron 1525 in sunshine yellow, with 4 GB RAM and 120 GB harddrive. It has Windows Vista (BLECH BLECH BLECH) and is one of the most awesomest (lol bad grammar) things I own. It came at just the right time too, because my old computer (also a Dell, but about seven or eight years old) was starting to get slow and obnoxious like the one I had before that.

So, yeah. I'll have internet access, but I probably won't post to livejournal because I'll be busy. We should be back by Saturday the 16th (almost a week before my birthday!). Yeah.

If I see another fanling use the phrase, "I'm gay for [insert character here]", I'm going to have to punch a small child. That is my biggest fandom pet peeve EVAR. It's like they don't even think about those of us who are ACTUALLY GAY and are sick of people implying that our sexual orientation is a choice or a joke or a flight of fancy.

In other news, I have become completely addicted to Civilization III. I mean so addicted that instead of doing homework, I do Civilization, and it's really bad. I have a really weird love-hate relationship with that game, because while it's a lot of fun to play, it's also not very representative of the entire world, and quite obviously believes that modern = Western. So yeah, I may just do the nerdiest thing ever and completely dissect the game on those grounds over the summer.

Today, I wrote a fake letter-essay in Spanish to the University of New Haven about what I would do if I attended their "fantastic university", as I put it. It was more of a challenge than I thought it would be, since I can hardly remember how to write a formal letter in English, let alone in Spanish. We had to be courteous and formal with it, and again, I can't even remember how to do that shit in English.

I've been going through my bookmarks to clean them up, and found that I have a lot more interesting stuff bookmarked than I thought. Many of them are news articles or blog posts that I think a lot of y'all would be interested in, so I've decided that once a week I'm going to post a few of them and summarize them. Here goes:

Foreignaffairs.org: Campaign 2008: Foreign Affairs is a magazine dedicated to foreign policy issues. They asked each candidate for President to write an essay detailing their foreign policy plans. Every single one is a good read, if only so you know the details of each candidate's take on the US's foreign policy.

Gallup Poll: "Majority of Republicans Doubt Theory of Evolution": Mike Huckabee is not alone. The title of the article on the poll is pretty self-explanatory, but this is some freaky shit.

Yesterday, my dad FINALLY went down to Best Buy to get our computer and my external harddrive checked out. It only took him three fruiting weeks to take of the latter, and he didn't even bring it with him, he just asked about it. And guess what?

They said it's going to cost several hundred dollars to get my four gigs of files off of there. Several. Hundred. Fucking. Dollars. To retrieve files off of an $80 device.

Wonderful. There goes all my icons. The images I hunted down. The screencaps I downloaded. My writing. My drawings. My essays. My lists. Everything.

Unless we can bitch Best Buy out. And I have a smidget of hope, because Best Buy is always finding ways to make money off of people with problems. That's what my experience has been the past several times I've gone there. "Oh, you're getting a really expensive new electronic device? You'll *need* one of our overpriced cases to go with it! See, only $30 for this one!" I'm wondering why the hell it costs so much to retrieve files from an external harddrive. Hello, the whole thing is just an internal harddrive and a case for it. That's it. How hard can it be to get the files from there? Someone, please explain this to me.

Greetings, F-list! This past weekend has been a very interesting one.

(And I would use a different icon, if only LJ would stop being so annoying and keep me logged in every time I go to update. >P)

To start off, we have a new computer downstairs. I have a new (used) computer up here in my room. I was stupid and forgot to transfer my bookmarks, because I assumed they would be on my external harddrive.

I haven't really been online for a while because we didn't have internets for a while. My dad only just fixed it here in my room.

Last night, I saw V for Vendetta. It is an awesome movie. <3

I have new speakers, and a new (used) keyboard. I don't know what the hell my dad and brother eat around this thing, but when I was trying to clean it out a couple days ago I found some weird goo underneath the keys. I stopped halfway through, so half of the keys are spic and span, and half of them are dusty and gross.