The Hypercube of Happydalek

Crap. NaNo ends today. I have...17,000 words. Yeah, that's not going to change. Two years running, and I'm thinking that November is simply the worst possible month for NaNo. Why can't it happen in, say, June? I never have anything going on in June. Oh well. Congrats to those who pressed on and hit the mark, and kudos to all who at least gave it a go, no matter how few words you wrote.

Also, in compy-related news, I feel a bit like Strongbad in the "Virus" sbemail. (I'd link to it, but...read on.) My compy seems to be full of viruses. Or maybe just one virus that's actually a trojan. Or something. Firefox is almost completely bolloxed, and now it's got into Google Chrome, as well. I have to right-click, open links from google in new tabs to avoid getting instantly redirected to any number of spam sites, and the browsers keep periodically opening new tabs to the spam sites even when I'm not googling. So far Internet Explorer seems to be immune, but I don't expect that to last. I've run avast and spybot, which have both identified and claimed to remove malicious software, yet the problem persists. I downloaded and attempted to run Malwarebites' Anti-Malware, but it keeps freezing during the quick scan after identifying an infected file that I have not been able to identify (because the program freezes before finishing the scan). Based on the behavior, I think I may have some version of the Daonol Trojan at work on my system, but I'm not sure about that because I don't know what it would look like in task manager.

To add to the awesome, lately the System in task manager has been consuming half or more of my CPU, and I don't know why. I tried finding out via MSinfo32, but it can't find the management files, and the fix microsoft told me to do on that won't work, because the stuff that needs to be running is already running.

So, my computer is buggy and broken. I already backed up all my personal documents yesterday onto an external HD, so between work today I think I'm just going to reboot everything from my system restore disk and hope that fixes it. I do not relish the hours of updates that will ensue when I redload the years-old version of XP, but I don't know what else to do. Not to mention having to redo all my bookmarks and everything. Urgh.

Wish me luck. :-/

I am looking at the internets through a spiffy, new (to me) 17-inch flatscreen monitor, ya'll! I got it from my bro-in-law who was keeping it for his mom, who lives a...rather itinerant lifestyle, we'll say, and hasn't room for it. It's been suggested that I may have to give it back one day, but until then, woo! Big pretty monitor! THE WORLD IS SO BRIGHT AND CLEAR. And my lil' 15" flatscreen that's been giving me periodic pink-screen-of-almost-death for over a year is now hooked up to my largely-dormant Win98 machine, allowing me to chuck the ginormous boxy monitor from the computing stone age that's been squatting atop my tiny desk in all its creaky, obsolete glory. Now all I've left to do is upgrade my RAM (and possibly just reinstall XP since I found my boot disk and I think I've probably got some trojans mucking things up) and I'll be all set!

I'm trying to catch up on "Heroes," but the damn feed keeps freezing up on my computer. Five minutes there, ten minutes here, then wham, stuck. The regular internet works fine, it's just the stupid streaming video. This frustrates me mightily.

1. It comes out of a box instead of a carton, or preferably, a punch bowl.

2. It looks brownish and watery instead of yellow and creamy.

3. It says "Rice Nog" on the box, and tastes like watery, sugary rice instead of thick, eggy egg nog.

Ew. NIce try, penny-pinching father-who-did-the-grocery-shopping. And by "nice," I mean gross.

Okay. Just had a dream where I was leading a bunch of people off of a broken roller coaster and we were stuck on a high platform in a cavernous warehouse where the only way out was to shimmy across some steel wires to a narrow vent shaft on the opposite wall (dream logic...idk). I was hanging there, getting the cover off the vent shaft (hammering at screws with a trowel, again, idk), when it popped off and I saw someone inside. It was William Shatner, and he was all like, "Hello! I thought I'd give you a hand by coming in this way and helping you all out." So people started climbing across the wires, and I followed Shat through the air vent to the other side, where I gushed about how I loved him on "Rescue 9-1-1" back in the 90's. (Yes, it was Old!Shat.)

Serves me right for sleeping 12 hours.

I had a fic recced on calufrax ! I feel so...legitimate. Or official? Like I can now apply for my official Fandom Participant Card or something. Thanks for the shout-out, philosophercat .

Also, I spent most of today arranging "Do You Hear What I Hear" for a viola quartet. Why that song? Dunno. It's pretty. I've got two of the four parts mostly hashed out, but it was sloooooooooooow going. Writing music is like....math. Seriously, it is. To help myself hear the parts, I recorded myself playing one of the parts, then re-recorded myself playing the second part along with the first recording, and that took FOREVER because my playing is not good. The resulting wav. file sounds like a couple of newbies who don't have ears for duet playing. *facepalm* But I am not discouraged. It was a lot of fun. Now I've taken a meal break (I kind of forgot to eat today, oops), and it's time to get back to it.

I love having Saturdays off!

A proper full-size viola has a 16" fingerboard. My viola is a 15", because a 16" is just too long for my short arms to play comfortably. While playing an undersized instrument is easier on my arms, it does bad things to the sound quality of the instrument. I didn't think one inch made much difference, until tonight. Like all stringed instruments, violas are tuned to the key of C. It's strings are, lowest to highest: C, G, D, and A. On the advice of the concert violinist who teaches where I work, I tried tuning my viola to D. That is, I cranked each string up one whole step, so the open strings are now D, A, E and B. What this did was make the string tension on my 15" viola the same as it would be on a full sized viola, and boy, what a lovely difference it makes! It sounds so much brighter and clearer than it did before. The difference is particularly noticeable on the lower strings, which formerly played with a muddier thunk because they were so loose. The added bonus is that I now have a B string, just like a guitar does, which will make for much easier duet-playing. The downside is that I now have to reorient myself with my sheet music. And my arrangement of Ashokan Farewell now contains a note that is too low to play. Oh well. I'll have fun messing around with it for the time being. Boy, does it sound pretty!

No nifty graphic this time, because, well...I cheated.  Kinda.  I committed copypasta.  Months ago, when I came up with this idea, I wrote a long scene out.  Since I did that, the plot has changed and things are different, but that scene still needed to happen, so I cut and pasted it, and modified it to fit the new plot and character developments.  So it's not like I really cheated.  I actually had to modify quite a bit of it, but it worked as a handy template, and got me well over my intended word count for the day in a third of the time I expected it to.  

I stand by it.  Even though I'm a bit worried that it took a half measure like that to keep me on track and it's only the second week.  Plotting is haaaaaard.  /whine 

Hope everyone's NaNo/Yuletide/whatever efforts are going well!

This site has saved my rump, totally.

In other news, The Socializing continues to go well.  I managed to just fit in a brief visit with a college friend I haven't seen in six months.  She happened to be in town (literally, I had to drive downtown, which I hate doing), but only briefly, and I had to go straight to work after, around rush hour, yet there was no traffic and I made excellent time both ways, didn't get lost, improvised when my initial parking plan fell through, and had a lovely time with all of it.  I think I'm getting quite peopled out at this point, but yes.  Quite a successful day, now capped with an awesome word count.  (I just wrote a really dodgy and probably completely inaccurate bit involving the police, but Plot Demanded It.) 

How's everybody doing?

It appears that Write or Die counts words differently than NaNo's validator.  WoD claimed my morning accomplishment was 1764 words.  But that same passage pasted into NaNo came up as only 1687.  Granted, that's only a difference of 77 words, but still. 

Remember this post, where I linked to a snippet of "Starlight," the demo version of what would become "Thriller?" 

No? 

Well, that's okay, because here's the full version of "Starlight."  It's exactly the same tune and a nearly identical arrangement to "Thriller," but with a totally different set of lyrics.  (Well, almost totally different lyrics.  There are lines here and there that survived into "Thriller," which makes listening to this demo even more of a brainwarp than it already is.)  I can't quite figure it out, and my google-fu can't find any lyrics online for it.  But imagine the alternate universe where this version of the song made it onto the record.

So, f-list, what other artist demos/alternate versions of things interest you? 

This would be a way awesomer achievement, except that I changed my project today, voiding my word count for the prior two days.  I've got to go to work now, but I'm hoping to make up the deficit tonight when I get home.  Thankfully, there will be no World Series to distract me tonight!

Edit: Okay, well I'm about a day behind in my word count now.  Just under.  Should be able to make that up tomorrow.  This story is flowing a lot more easily than my first one was, so that's a good sign.  Bring it on, day four!

It ain't much, but I went overboard yesterday so I'm still about 400 words over the minimum.  Not bad, considering I'm kind of completely winging it. 

And all I've done to mark the occasion this year was watch a few horror movies and make a sequined glove that I didn't even really wear.  Now I'm sitting in front of my computer, sipping a beer and waiting for NaNo to start. And the cool thing about it this year is that the time changes at 2 AM tomorrow, so I get an extra hour to make that daily 1,667 word count my bitch.  I'm hoping to churn out double that limit tomorrow, so I'll have some breathing room when next week hits me like a ton of bricks.  I won't have much time to work during the day tomorrow, since I promised to help my sister move, and then I'm going out to dig. 

On the plus side, last night's episode of Medium (which I don't usually watch) was themed on Night of the Living Dead, and it was very well done and made me quite squeeful, since it included clips of the actual movie, and the fact that one of the main characters on that show (the husband) was one of leads in the 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead.  

Someday I will write that zombie epic I've been dreaming of and it will be magnificent. 

Just got back from "This Is It."  It's not a documentary, and it's not really a concert film.  I went to see it with a friend of mine, and he called it a "musical documentary."  It was, in short, a very uplifting, fascinating 2 hours full of great music, gentle humor, and mind-blowing effects.  Those concerts would have been AMAAAAAZING. 

( Click for spoilery reactions. )

( Work, music and movies are my life right now. )

Wow, this post got waaaaay huger than I planned, for something that doesn't have much of consequence about it.  And it's now past my bedtime, so toodles, LJ!  I'm reading everybody's stuff, even if I haven't been commenting much.  (Have I been commenting?  I don't even remember.)

Spoilers.

( Reactions. )