Dammit, iPod 80gig. I'm a technology whore. A total whore. Now my 60gig vid is no longer the best. Now I'm going to have to go buy the 80gig and demote my 60gig from being the coolest thing in the world (kinda) to being just an external drive. I may be a girl, but toys are to me what diamonds are to whoever it is who likes diamonds. Oh, double dammit, the 80gig is less than I paid for my 60gig.

Bob was as perplexed as a hacker who means to access T:\flw.quid55328.com\aaakk/ch@ung but gets T:\flw.quidaaakk/ch@ung by mistake.

Well, not really..., I just ache! OMG, peoples, I must be the stupidest person in the world. (If you're going to agree, go get a papercut in the crease of a finger most likely to come into contact with salt. *grin*)

For most people, starting (or, in my case, restarting) ballet with a class or two per week is good, three or four is pushing it. Because it's HARD.

This week I've got five, then, starting next week, ten. Three on Mondays and Wednesdays, one on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and two on Saturdays.

I HURT! Like severely. It's funny. I went to grab something on the floor and had to put my hands on my knees and bend over ssssslooooooowwwwlllllyyyyy like a feeble geriatric person. I don't think there's a single part of my body that doesn't hurt. My legs, calves, tummy, arms.... Okay, so my hair doesn't hurt. But otherwise?

I'm so exhausted. In a good-bad way. Good in that it's good for my health and distracts me from not-happy thoughts, bad in that all I want to do is sit around watching martial arts movies, like Bloodsport (true story about Frank Dux, who ditched the military to go fight in an underground kumite). And, you know, I'm going to lose a ton more weight. Woot!

So figurative puty, peoples! Well, not even that. I just want some ballet talk and to see what people have to say about this. 'Tis some of the only amusement I have right now because I hurt too much to even go take a bath! No, wait. Vaseline bath salts, coconut-mango bubble stuff, wine, candles.... Scratch that. Bathtub, here I come!

...and then immediately drink Coke. You'll throw up.

I've decided that mixing these two together might be a bad idea.

I know this is off-topic for tech stuff, but I don't care.

I lost one of my dearest friends hours before finding out my mother is dying. My work is changing so much that I feel new and lost. The only bright spot was a romance rekindling. I had his support and confessed love. The place I felt safest in this world was when he would hold me, and his kisses made the hurt stop for a moment, especially the butterfly-soft ones.

Between 3am this morning and noon, he went from sending kisses on AIM to suddenly saying I am the reason for some of his problems, that I manipulated him and set brother against brother, son against father, this past weekend, and earned his trust through coersion and lies, that I would tell them different stories. His brother feels the same way.

Yet I can prove exactly the opposite using his own LiveJournal posts and replies, and his and his brother's IMs, which are autosaved with Trillian. I can prove I reinforced his brother's love and asked him to not cut his brother, that I defended his brother not understanding some things, supported the difficult decision he made to cut his father from his life, who he described as "toxic" (I can prove this), ultimately talked him into giving his father another chance as the reasons for the cut were third-degree heresay, and encouraged him to speak directly with his brother and father about his problems with them. I am dead-serious when I say I can prove this using their own words in the form of typed proof. And the one thing I can recall having told them different was telling one brother I thought he wwas right on something, but, after six whole weeks, came to view an incident differently and so told the other that I thought he was right. This was after six weeks and my thoughts on the matter changing, not telling one one thing, and telling the other another thing an hour later.

Someone manipulating someone doesn't want the manipulatee to increase contact and communication with those she wants to set him against. She wouldn't try to convince him to talk openly with those she'd tell lies about, the very ones who can confirm or deny the truth. She wouldn't constantly reinforce his brother's love for him, and tell him a gesture his father made was one of wanting to establish a relationship when he thought it was a sign of his father not caring enough to know him.

I believe that, if you make accusations, be prepared to back it up, and be certain of it enough to be willing to allow the accused one the right to defend herself. If you're sure enough of your stance on it, you'll be able to hold your end against her defense. But to make an accusation public, then to disallow her to defend herself - that's cowardly and shows a lack of certainty, and maybe even a cruel desire to hurt her to make yourself feel better and in control of something.

I can make an honest jusitifcation for why he and his brother are doing this. I was put in the middle of their complaints about each other, had to try to come to some middle ground in belief on my own because I didn't want to believe either when they were saying bad things abut each other, and because I was in the middle and it just wasn't working, they weren't communicating, it was easiest to blame me. Easier to blame me than to blame each other or themselves. I never tried to hurt them, always tried to be a good friend who listened when they needed it, who'd dry tears, hold a hand, let one talk for hours when he needed to, even when that need came the day after I found out my mom is dying. All caring and loving did was earn his distrust.

I love him still, have never stopped, even after he put me through hell emotionally, and I just don't know how to get him and his brother to revisit their own words and see the truth. He was the one bright spot on my bleak horizon.

I accidentally hit the wrong thing and deleted this entry when I was trying to edit it and copy somewhere else. Blonde moment.

For a friend's surprise costume birthday party, I changed my costume when my roommate and I were about half an hour from leaving. Instead of being the Green Fairy from Moulin Rouge, I decided to go with black tights, black silk velvet corset, black lace undies, a green sash, and my black velvet cloak. Mere said Iw as "indecisive," so that is what I went as. I was "Indecisive." (Though by the end of the night, when we girls were assigned one of the seven deadly sins, I was assigned Lust.)

When I have options, I am indecisive, like to make the best decision. So, after a month of trying to decide between a MacBook and MacBook Pro, getting all the info and reviews I can, from people who have them to friends who work for Apple, I've decided on the 2GHz MacBook with a RAM upgrade to 2GB, and I want to upgrade the hard drive, but Apple tops out at offering 120GB. Somehow I am bothered by the idea of my iPod having half that (well, not really, the 60GB iPod has a few BG less of available space), so will probably get it with the standard 60Gb and upgrade it to probably 200GB myself. I'm not afraid to open up electronic things and play with them. Never have been.

Briefly I considered the black macBook, but there are only three differences, the color, 20MB more on the HD, and $200. To upgrade the HD on the white would be $45, and then the two would identical but for color, and the $155-difference would be put to better use. Hell, it's $90 to upgrade the RAM from 512MB to 1GB, and I'd still be up $65 on the white, and with a faster machine. But I'm going to go for 2GB. The way I see it is that I'd rather get something a few steps over what I think I'll need and not need it rather that to get exactly what I need, only to find I need more later on.

And since this will be used for work more than anything, and since I am a contractor, it's all a nice tax write-off.

I'm so damned tired of PCs.

I am Aria, 25, live in Mountain View, California, home to companies such as Google, and since it will probably be asked, I am single. But there is a difference between single and available. It's possible to be one without the other.

I am an analytical engineer, basically a fancy way to say I decide what's spam and phishing and program my company's software to recognize certain aspects of it, such as certain URLs, phone numbers, etc., to prevent it from going to out clients' inboxes. Sometimes I assign values to keywords into the Beyesian. It's boring as all hell, but it pays a nice full-time salary for part-time hours.

I didn't go to college. Before finishing high school, I had started my first company, a small business making movie gown reproductions, which later turned into custom designing. This is something I'll still do on the side soemtimes. At 22, I became a fathers' rights advocate after seeing what my then-fiancé had to go through to be allowed to spend literally just two hours per month with his daughter. I quickly rose to be on the board of directors of an international fathers' rights organization. Being a woman doesn't mean I automatically believe mothers are better parents. Not at all.

The following year I co-founded another company with said-then-fiancé, bonding transactions to increase trust in the online trading community, blah blah. When we broke up, I let him take the company. All he's done with it since then is to finish the trademark I started, but otherwise, he knows little about the company, so it's all but dead.

Technology has always intersted me. I like knowing how things work and making them work. Until last summer, I never had the chance to learn anything. Until last summer, the only thing I knew at all was that HTML stands for hyper text markup language. But what that meant was a mystery. Of all things, I started to learn HTML due to LiveJournal. It made sense there, so when I picked up some books, it was like second nature to learn so much more.

As far as languages and such go, I am still in the process of learning some that seem basic to others. I've just started online courses in Java and Perl (Python isn't offered) through Foothill College. I both feel slightly embarassed that I don't know more than I do, while at the same time proud to be doing what I do for a living at my age, coming from knowing nothing at all a year ago to being a well-respected engineer at a large company. I've got the motivation, the drive to succeed. My goal is to be a programmer.

Let's see. Aside from tech stuff, I write poetry, and dance ballroom on Friday nights, and especially enjoy tango, rhumba, swing, and Viennese waltzing, and used to take ballet. I was a flutist for 14 years, and used to sing.

I absolutely adore Battlestar Galactica, the new series (though the original is great fun too), and it's the reason I went with a video iPod, so I could put BSG on it. Robot Chicken is fantastic, as is South Park and The Daily Show. A dear friend introduced me to a band called A Silver Mount Zion, and that music is wonderful. I think I'm hooked on Tool's song Vicarious right now.

As I am putting of studying I need to be doing right now, I'm going to get back to that as I am not sure anyone will even read this, so why waste my time? :) Oh, and this is me.