Thursday, December 27, 2007

Christmas Post
Azure: Wow, I didn't realize you were studying Japanese as well. I have some friends that did a big intensive program in the states, but I'll leave this discussion to a later blog. :]

Shin: It was awesome chatting with you the other day. Like I said in my last post, we need a big group chat.

What would my return be without a blog about Christmas? I'm not technically Christian (though my family is and I was baptized), nor am I really religious apart from enjoying considering their ideas, but let's face it - I've given up trying to fight the whole gift exchange holiday at this point. ~_^ Should it matter that I've been hypocritically conforming to this consumption when I don't pretend to hold any of the underlying beliefs that correspond to the holiday? Of course not, there are freaking presents! :D

So anyway, my day began as per Christmas usual, with my brother waking me up at 5:30 in the morning to sort presents. I slept in as long as possible until my parents were ready to start opening at around 6, then half-reluctantly came downstairs. We went through unwrapping gifts for about a half hour, made breakfast, tried out the new stuff, waited for my grandfather and his girlfriend to come over, had an early dinner, and I stayed up late playing video games and messing with my computer. As far as gifts go, I got my brother an iTunes gift card to go with the iPod shuffle he would get, my mom a metronome to assist her in learning to play piano, my dad a gym bag because his old one ripped, and my brother and I got the family a new stereo to replace one that broke a couple years ago. lol And what did I get, you ask? Good question!

THE LIST:
-Mac OS X Leopard
-Two 1-GB RAM memory sticks
-120-GB internal hard drive
-Wii Classic Controller
-Super Mario Galaxy
-"Quick Fixes from Mixes" recipe book
-Prop-up pillow
-Feather pillow
-Family Guy calendar
-Gloves
-Pencil sharpener, pen, sandwich container
-Button-up shirt
-Pants
-A kick-ass yin-yang necklace
-Death Note shirt
-The Art of Naruto
-T'ai Chi Classics

The first thing I did was replace the RAM in my computer to make sure it worked before I attempted the internal hard drive. And it did work! Yay! The internal drive was a little more tricky. Firstly, it looked a little different from the original, which had a cover and tab to pull out easily. I made the decision just to go ahead without trying to replace the cover, and followed the directions from Apple's website. In formatting the drive, however, the directions were very vague, and when I went to install Mac OS X nothing happened. ;_; To make a long story short, this is how my day went:
1. Tried installing it again, still didn't work.
2. Used the program SuperDuper to clone my old internal drive onto my external drive.
3. The program froze my computer partway through and erased the external drive, losing my friend's files as well as my own, though luckily most of those files were on my other external drive.
4. Cleared and reformatted the external drive on my parent's PC.
5. Re-backed up my old files onto my old external drive.
6. Found a new way to format my new internal drive without partitioning.
7. Attempted to install Mac OS X Tiger, and it worked, so I installed Leopard on top of that.
8. Began putting on programs and old data.

The move over to this internal drive continued throughout the next day, and I actually had to put in my old drive to get more files I forgot. Geeze, I feel like a lost a couple days there being out of touch with the internet almost completely, as well as having little social contact with anyone except my family. lol

And while I was waiting for numerous things to load on my computer, I played tons of video games and watched movies until about 5 in the morning. Having received Mario Galaxy, I made the decision to beat just 2 of the original 8 games I had lined up that I wanted to go through before Galaxy: Twilight Princess and Mario 64. I've owned the former since launch and still haven't gotten around to beating it yet, having left almost a year ago searching for the yetti with the red fish, and only recently made it into the ice dungeon. The latter, apart from leading up to Galaxy, is also one that I've been meaning to go back and beat completely. I think I was about halfway through before I stopped playing, but I just downloaded it off Virtual Console and played with my new classic controller. By the end of the day, I was in the Temple of Time for Twilight Princess and 30 stars in for Mario 64. So yeah, good stuff.

I guess that's all for now. Hope you all had an awesome Christmas! lataz
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