Vainglorious Vicissitudes

No doubt at least a few of y'all will find this interesting: Apparently Minesweeper is NP-complete. Not only that, but you can use it to build logic gates.

So, I went to bed fairly early last night, got up early this morning to do some last-minute studying, and despite some annoying blanks in recollection I think I did pretty well on that midterm. At least a B, I figure--maybe an A-minus if he curves it.

But now the drawbacks of not being net-connected at home are sinking in more and more. For one thing, there are all kinds of things like job-hunting that I want to do on my own computer, because I want to be able to save pages easily to go back to later and because it's easier somehow to do that sort of thing in a comfier environment; it's tough to get up the motivation here in the lab. Also, the way I spend my days is becoming increasingly screwy. This afternoon I was in a typical state: I didn't want to go home because I never feel like going back up to campus again in the evening, so basically I'd have to either hang around my place all night and feel all disconnected from the world, and probably get a bit depressed as a result, or hang around here all day, even during the stretches when I had no email and no one was posting on LJ, and be very much at loose ends.

Fortunately, in this case I got a lucky roll on the Random (or at least Semi-Random) Encounter table, and met up with a friend who introduced me to a friend of his who was accompanied by a friend of his who invited me to play some pool at his place, so that made for a good few hours' diversion and now I'm in an okay mood to go home after one last email and LJ read. But still, I really hope to not be in this state for much longer.

Ack, I've been meaning to post this and I've kept forgetting. The Landmark Act I & II in downtown Berkeley is showing The Blues Brothers this Friday and Saturday at midnight. I'm planning on going to the Saturday show; does anyone else wanna come?

I was having problems with Quicktime--it kept crashing IE--so I threw up my hands and uninstalled it. Somehow it still kept crashing IE. So I tried to reinstall it, and got some silly error message.

rrrrRRRRRRRRRRRgh.

Today doesn't seem to be a great day in terms of people being happy with me. My roommates suspect that I somehow managed to break their computer, based on the fact that I was using it right before they discovered their browser had crashed in some weird and apparently unfixable way (a way that also seems to involve spyware having been installed). This despite the fact that all I did was try to use the browser and find that it had already crashed or frozen or whatever the hell it was up to. It might indeed have crashed at that very moment, but I don't see how my using it could have caused that if it wasn't about to happen anyway. But given that they're a hell of a lot less computer-literate than I am (and that's saying something), they still seem dubious.

*grumble grumble*

(by the way, "injury to insult" is the bit that wouldn't fit in the Current Music field)

The idea of getting a piercing or a tattoo is flinch-worthy enough--I don't even want to think about getting me some eyeball jewelry.

(On the subject of needles, though, I have to admit that yesterday's blood test ended up being somehow much less stress-filled than past ones have been. Having a friend nearby definitely helped, perhaps even more than I anticipated, though I also seem to have done a better job of distracting myself.)

A while ago I was compelled, in the context of a silly conversation, to plug "Frodo Baggins" into the Internet Anagram Server. Some of the best results:

forging so bad
boggard of sin
signboard fog
brigands goof
rabid fog snog
bard of goings
I snog drab fog

My favorite, for no real reason: braid of gongs
and perhaps the most relevant: bad ring goofs

I myself, meanwhile, am apparently equivalent to A Vile Soy Renewal - Or a Wesleyan Veil.

Over the last week or two I've been more depressed than usual. Probably at least some of that is hormonal, but knowing that doesn't seem to help much. I'm just not finding even the little motivation I usually have--everything seems pointless, and this of course leads to a vicious cycle as the fact that I'm getting nothing done makes me still more depressed. Loneliness is a big chunk of it too, as I'm in one of those places in my life where it seems there's no one I'm super close to, and no one who really can spare much time for me even if I felt I had the right to ask them to, and that doesn't look likely to change any time soon.

Something's gotta give. I just don't know what yet.