I had the most dissatisfactory day yesterday. It was bad enough that I considered complaining but only managed forth a few profanities. And then I cried.

Here's the story:

I'm currently caring for my mother's beauceron (a dog breed of cow-like proportions). She brought it to my house the day before yesterday, and everything was going exceptionally well. I can generally control the dog better than her owners and I am very fond of her.

However, I had a really sucky day yesterday. I have a terrible flu and when my lectures ended at five, I was feeling tired and miserable. I cycled home and took the dog out for a walk, feeling a bit feverish. All is well. We walk for few peaceful kilometres and she does her business on the side of the road. I squat down to collect the droppings into a plastic bag (need I mention that her business is also of cow-size proportions) when suddenly she sees an aggressive-looking dog on the other side of the road (I, of course, fail to take notice of this, squatting down with my back turned) and of course she decides that 1) I am in need of protection 2) she just really, really needs to go say hi to the dog RIGHT NOW. She lunges towards the dog, I make a 180, fall down and she drags me for a few metres before she notices that I'm not really with her rather than just hanging on to the leash. End result: my knees are bloodied, my palms have cuts and I'm covered in her business, having just plowed through dog shite, sand and pavement.

I was, of course, still wearing my smart(ish) leather jacket I had on at the university, and of course it's dry clean only. My trousers were in shreds so they got tossed. Aaand there's nothing like walking the few kilometres home dragging a fourty-kilo dog with your entire front covered in blood and dog business.

Kialkarkea:
Well. Evidently my keyboard issues are driver related, because I find it hard to believe that my W, R, I, U and left arrow keys were all simultaneously struck by a concurrently intermittent hardware issue. At least I think it
is. I am notoriously terrible at troubleshooting my own problems.

This of course, raises the question: What causes a perfectly fine driver to suddenly start to fail in such a particular fashion?

That sounds hardware to me. Each key doesn't have a dedicated circuit so it's not unusual for a group of keys to go at once. (They are usually in a "grid" so each is on two circuits each of which has several keys, and the chip figures out the key by the combination of circuits lit up. The "grid" does not correspond to physical layout but to where the circuit board traces go.)

Lendren:

That sounds hardware to me. Each key doesn't have a dedicated circuit so it's not unusual for a group of keys to go at once. (They are usually in a "grid" so each is on two circuits each of which has several keys, and the chip figures out the key by the combination of circuits lit up. The "grid" does not correspond to physical layout but to where the circuit board traces go.)

See, I thought that too at first, but I had the laptop serviced not a month ago and it came back with no outstanding issues. That aside, the keys rarely seem to act up during normal use- it's only when I'm doing something particularly memory intensive that the things start to fail.

Rather frustrating thing though. I am entirely unaccustomed to having my keyboard break. Chipsets, yes, drives, yes, even a few power supplies, but never my keyboard.

This is the third time this year no one in the house can find something we should definitely have. Once was my headphones, twice now it's been games. Where are they disappearing to?! Grr. Getting really sick of tearing the house apart in desperation. It's not even like we're messy people; things are generally right where they're supposed to be, which is what makes this even more frustrating. To keep finding out that things have up and disappeared...grrrrr. We'd better find this game tomorrow, because I will be extremely pissed if I have to write it off as "mysteriously disappeared" like the last two things this happened with. And the more it happens, the less able I am to convince myself it just got lost somehow. Things don't just evaporate after a certain amount of time. They are somewhere they shouldn't be, in this house or otherwise, and I'd very much like to know why.

The baby is eating them.

Did you check in everyone's other pants pocket?

Welp, both copies we own of the game in question are missing. They're in no room in the house that anyone can see, and believe me, I did not half-ass this search. My anger over this was met with "why don't you just download it, who cares". What. The. Hell! I CARE. Of course I care about this! My headphones, Pokemon Black, and TWO copies of Final Fantasy VII have gone missing in the past few months, and no one cares but me? I am all but hulking out at this.

I love it when someone on the internet makes me hate myself. Such an awesome feeling. I know, I know...I shouldn't care that some condescending asshole calls me a condescending bitch or remakes about the fact that I have no life and still live with my parents while not working/going to school. But I do, and I cried...and the moment I tell my dad the only thing he'll says is that I shouldn't care and people are assholes. Why can't there just be a button that makes your life all nice and neatly ordered. Where you can just press it and it gives you a nice job, a decent education and the ability to not be bothered by internet jerks.

Sarvasti:

I love it when someone on the internet makes me hate myself. Such an awesome feeling. I know, I know...I shouldn't care that some condescending asshole calls me a condescending bitch or remakes about the fact that I have no life and still live with my parents while not working/going to school. But I do, and I cried...and the moment I tell my dad the only thing he'll says is that I shouldn't care and people are assholes. Why can't there just be a button that makes your life all nice and neatly ordered. Where you can just press it and it gives you a nice job, a decent education and the ability to not be bothered by internet jerks.

Possibly the most important thing to remember in this situation: said internet jerks do not actually know you, and so are making comments on partial and likely personal observations and thus not in any way, shape or form doing you full credit.

As an addendum: Therefore there's no reason for you to take whatever they say about you to heart, since they don't know your whole story and are judging based on what they want to see.

Twice now a friend has offered me work and I haven't been able to take it, firstly because I don't have a passport (which I'm now rectifying, but I wont have one in time), and this time because I have a prior engagement. I'd REALLY love to do some work but I can't really get out of it.

Bah, if I keep on turning him down he'll stop offering me it, which is annoying because working for him even once would be a good opportunity for some networking and ensuring future work... Unhappy.

Ever since the embassy incident camp pendleton has been ramping up their heavy artillery testing or something late at night into the early hours of the morning... I'm miles and miles and miles away but the booming and the rumbling manages to carry through the coastline somehow, rattles the house and sets off my earthquakemode sense and I can't get a wink of sleep T_T, so far tonight's not as bad as last night.... so maybe there's hope.

Sometimes even a completely mundane thing is all it takes to ruin a day that was just barely going alright. I'd say tomorrow can't come fast enough, but somehow I feel like it's not going to go any better.

My second older brother keeps trying to convert me to his religion and the bonds of familial love are straining to keep me from explaining just exactly how unappealing that is and the fact that he never uses any punctuation, ever, only adds to the pressure building in me that is going to explode in a potentially hurtful rant.

So I came here to let off some of the steam. :lol:

Convert him.

Metric solves everything.

Earwig butt sticking out from behind something. Return with bugspray, earwig butt gone. Spray safety perimeter around offending object. Never feel comfortable again.

I typically only get this sick once a year. :(

Additionally, I just found out my teacher flat out rejected one of my papers for the sole reason of it being an ODT instead of a .doc, despite the fact that the submission software automatically converts them. I don't understand her problem. :(

.ODT is one of the reasons I now own the full Microsoft Office Suite.

I had 2 presentations almost crash and burn last semester because my Libreoffice-created presentations would not work with Microsoft Office on the professors' computers.

If you're a university student, you should be able to buy Microsoft Office University 2010 for only $99 bux. You just have to prove you're a student to activate it. I got it on sale for $80 and I couldn't be happier. May even write it off on my taxes, lol.


EDIT: Also, the Microsoft Office University suite comes with the full shebang. Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Access, Outlook, Publisher, and OneNote. I use all of those regularly with the exception of Publisher and Powerpoint now.

Kialkarkea:

I typically only get this sick once a year. :(

Additionally, I just found out my teacher flat out rejected one of my papers for the sole reason of it being an ODT instead of a .doc, despite the fact that the submission software automatically converts them. I don't understand her problem. :(

My uni requires us to always submit .pdf.

stangmar:

.ODT is one of the reasons I now own the full Microsoft Office Suite.

I had 2 presentations almost crash and burn last semester because my Libreoffice-created presentations would not work with Microsoft Office on the professors' computers.

If you're a university student, you should be able to buy Microsoft Office University 2010 for only $99 bux. You just have to prove you're a student to activate it. I got it on sale for $80 and I couldn't be happier. May even write it off on my taxes, lol.


EDIT: Also, the Microsoft Office University suite comes with the full shebang. Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Access, Outlook, Publisher, and OneNote. I use all of those regularly with the exception of Publisher and Powerpoint now.

Unless you run Linux, or are like me and will never ever ever buy another Microsoft product because they are the electronic devil, almost as much so as Apple.

And I've never had any problems with OpenOffice, other than it being a processor hog. ;)

I have a copy of microsoft office, but it's on my desktop and due to a few reformattings in years past, I'm out of activations on the particular CD key associated with it. I don't feel like calling up Microsoft and asking them to provide an activation key just so I can put it on my laptop if I have a perfectly acceptable alternative already installed. There's no cartoon paperclips or anything.