A Day In The Life Of A Peanut Butter Cup

Listen Up!
So I got an email from my supervisor at work "We're gonna be shipping less and less to the stores now, so start hand spacing the items to be equally spaced apart" Yup, it's that time of year when the job begins to turn into a slow paced time of "we don't need you to be in as much" which is good in a way, because the semester is starting and I need the time for class, but it also means I won't have as much money. Crap. OH! Also, at work today, I helped a group of 3 kids and their mom go around the tropical plants section and buy 1 plant each for the kids, that was, as embarrassing as it is to say, a bit heartwarming...
::
Ah, so now comes the problem with Tech.MCC, I believe you already know if you read each week that I picked up a big rear projection TV from someone's lawn a few months ago, and that I've been meaning to use it for a Tech.MCC project. Well I had a brainstorm with a member the other day, and the project was pretty much planned out in FULL, and it was really feasable and easy, from that one brainstorm, and the next day when I went in to ask the college if they had room for me to store it there, they said no, bottom line. So my dad doesn't want it taking up space in the shed and the college won't keep it, and it's a hundred an fifty pounds or so. I really hope a club member will take it off my hands because I'd hate to throw it out, it's a prefectly good tv in fine working condition......
::
Jugglers On Juggling seems to be doing just fine, with a couple hundred views on the first two episodes, and all they were were convention reviews of the IJA. This third episode releasing today is something that I think really will help certain people. It's about how to capture images of you juggling and turning them into an animated gif. Yes, that's a bit narrow focused, but it's a detailed and useful tutorial, and I've found that trying to be too broad in topics over the course of a season leaves you without topics fast. That said the next 4 episodes after this will ALL be about juggling music videos.
::


Daily Life:
Well the most interesting thing to happen this week was certainly, my laptop. As I was transferring downloaded files on Tuesday last week to free up hard drive space, my laptop suddenly died on me. One second it was transferring all the files to the USB drive no prob, the next moment it was a black screen. I didn't think much of it at first, after all my laptop has crashed on me numerous times before, seeing as how it was from 2002, granted it never crashed like THAT, but it was just another crash I thought. Key words being I THOUGHT. I hit the power button again and it proceeded to load through the bios, everything seemed to check out fine until it was time to load into windows... "Operating System Not Found"

Shit. This meant only one of three things, either the hard drive has died/been wiped, the hard drive got disconnected somehow, or my computer was dead. The easiest way for me to diagnose my problem was to go through and run another operating system from either a CD or a floppy drive, and when DOS didn't work on a floppy, I managed to load up Ubuntu off of my CD. What was I looking for? To see if it could see my hard drive. What did I find? Nothing. Well at least I knew one of the three hadn't happened, the hardware was still absolutely fine seeing as how it could run Ubuntu, and I knew the hard drive hadn't been wiped either because I would have seen it show up as just a blank disk. So it was either my hard drive was toast, or it got disconnected somehow.

Well in that moment I decided something, I realized that I had a spare 4 gig flash drive laying around, and I've been meaning to try running Ubuntu on my laptop long term. So I didn't bother to tear apart my laptop (at least not completely, I did open up just the basic panels to see where the hard drive would be located), I simply inserted the 4 gig drive, installed Ubuntu on it, and away I went using Ubuntu via the flash for the past week.

It wasn't bad at all, Ubuntu is a pretty stable operating system, and it ran just fine, and it wasn't too different from windows that I could easily use the system for whatever I needed to do online and game playing. One thing though that I noticed, support was DISMAL. There were only about a hundred games to choose to install when I searched, and programs besides that are pretty much useless to me. That said, I got used to it quite quickly and I'm gonna keep using Ubuntu on there from time to time.

Does that mean my hard drive works? YES. When my neighbors wifi suddenly didn't want to work for some reason last night I pretty much had no use to have the laptop running, and so I decided that that night would be the night to find out if I was royally screwed or not. I opened up my laptop screw by screw, removing the removable drives, the keyboard, then finally the outer shell. I lifted the shell off of the hard drive to find nothing looking off, and after giving a few pokes and nudges to see if it was loose or not connected properly, I saw it was indeed still intact and in the right place. So I went to undo the screws to take out the drive, and I quickly found out that the screws were hex screws and that I didn't have access to a set of hex screwdrivers until the morning, so I put everything back together and somehow I decided to try booting it up without the USB drive in the slot. It went to the bios, and as I was waiting to see the error message, the windows XP loading screen popped up! Holy Crap was I happy! By simply touching my drive, I managed to fix a week long problem! SWEET! Of course I still have no idea whether it will die again or not, so I'm backing everything up off of the laptop as I type XD


Juggle This:
So seeing as how I went to college again a few days ago to try and get space for the massive TV for Tech.MCC, I brought my rings and camera to see if I could get a few good tricks on film for my next video. I really want to make the next one a good one seeing as how Adverse Reaction was really a piece of crap. Anyways, I go into the stage and thankfully it's empty, but better than that. they're doing sound checks, so they're playing rock music over all the speakers, and it makes me feel good to juggle to it.

Of course the problem is, I haven't practiced my rings since the last time I was here a few weeks ago, and even more than that the lights were on in a way that I could not get any good angles near a power outlet. THAT SAID, I did get footage, and man did I get some, I recorded myself doing a 6 ring half shower for the first time after IJA, even managing to get a clean 10 catches of the pattern! I also, out of absolutely nowhere, tried to do two 3up 180's out of 3 in a row, and I made it on the first try, wow was that surprising when I saw my hands still running the cascade. I also realized how little spinning I was doing in the last and this video, so I went to try a 5 ring 3up 180, and somehow after not getting it a few times, I got the crazy idea to try a 5 up. I never got it back to the pattern, but it felt REMARKABLY easy, and most of the reason I was having trouble getting it was because I had already juggled 6 ring stuff for about a half hour before I started trying, so my arms were tired and sore and I was fueled only on adrenaline. I did manage to get it to a collect, and then to 2 catches of a cascade after coming back around. I am SO getting that next time I practice.

A Day In The Life Of A Peanut Butter Cup ~ Reeses2150