Reading through my feeds tonight, I saw this post in Neil Gaiman’s journal.

I was struck by the name of the photographer.

Sure enough, it is the same Mimi Ko I knew from Wellesley. Wow!

(It was she who supplied the nascent WA with raw episodes of Sailor Moon and Utena way back in 1996 or so, and was otherwise cool and invaluable to the group.)

It sent me running over to LiveJournal, at which site I have been absolutely horrific about checking my friendslist for, er, ever. Not that it matters when I don’t comment on things. But I should try to be better about it.

The post below is passworded just so the post itself is less likely to show up in search engines. It’s not intended to be ’sekret’. The password is the title of this blog.

I’d truly intended to write up that post directly, but I got distracted.

Earlier this year, I’d started to notice that my laptop (purchased in August ‘02, just before I started at Tufts), would occasionally have this weird issue where the screen refresh would go wonky and everything on the screen would start shifting oddly to one side as I scrolled or moved a window around. Once this happened, it was only a matter of time before the computer crashed, and when it came back on, it kept saying that the problem was a result of the Graphics card device driver not being able to complete a drawing operation.

My diagnosis was that the thing was overheated (or I had a really strange spyware on my machine, but I never have been able to find out what it was, if it existed) and taking the laptop out of my lap usually prevented the issue from recurring again for some time. Until this summer, when it began to happen with a frequency that was enough to be annoying.

Rather than wait until the screen gave out entirely, and since the computer was already 4, I ordered a new Toshiba from their online store. And that was what distracted me — they were having a big sale at the time, so along with the computer, for an additional $20, I also got a USB drive, a nylon carrying case, a photo printer, and a wireless-G router. (And the computer itself costed $500 less than the old laptop had.) Naturally, all of these items shipped separately, so I spent a week and a half refreshing on UPS’s tracking site, watching my items travel across the country.

The final shipment (the computer), was finally dispatched on the 14th, from Shanghai, which tracking journey proved to be the most entertaining, as it somehow traveled from Shanghai to Beijing and back again in the space of one hour, then arrived in Alaska at 2:49 PM when it was only 10 AM in Alaska at the time. But then, we all know that funny things happen when you engage a warp drive in the atmosphere of a planet…

In any case, it arrived last Wednesday and I’ve spent the last week or so getting the settings just how I like and using the iPod to transfer files over from the old computer and playing several games which would not run on the crappy graphics card in the old computer.

I went to Pittsburgh in the middle of July for the on-campus part of my online courses.

It was a pretty good trip, though it was ridiculously hot there (a trend which unfortunately continued at home through much of last week) and my hotel did not have free internet in the guest rooms.

As a result, I did not once turn on the television in my room. Not once.

Anyway, since it was so very hot and by the time classes were done for the day I was tired and just wanted to lie around in an air conditioned space, I did not actually go out to see much of Pittsburgh beyond the Oakland area where the University is located. Also at the time, I had our new camera, but only a v. v. tiny memory card, so I could only take 7 pictures at a time. When I finally upload them, I’ll write a bit more about the small amount of stuff I did see on my visit.

What I did do was eat at a different restaurant for every meal that I actually ate, and though I did hit Arby’s, Panera and Starbucks, I didn’t actually repeat any restaurants, during the visit and I tried to stay away from chains as much as I could. A college is a natural breeding ground for random places to eat, and since my hotel was quite some distance (about a mile) from where class was held, I got to walk past them all twice a day. More about the food later, too.

And, ha ha, more about the classes later, too. I may actually investigate Wordpress’s ability to lock entries for that one. The experience was good, for the most part, I just have some opinions on a few topics which I think I’d rather not have indexed in a search engine…