Another long pause

Yeah, so I'm apparently bad at keeping a regular schedule with this thing. In the interim I've built myself a computer, started my last rotation, and done some other fun stuff that I don't really remember because it's been more than two weeks. First, the computer.

It's pretty sweet. Specs and parts:
Motherboard
AMD 3.0GHz Quad core processor
512MB Radeon HD 4870 graphics card
4GB RAM
1Tb hard drive
DVD RW drive
and a nice enough wireless card
all in this case.

Also, it's running the Windows 7 beta, which is a lot like Vista minus the bad parts that made me not like it. I'm still getting used to parts of it and it still feels a lot like a Mac, but they're starting to make it feel like something of its own instead of some unholy Mac-dows (Win-mac?) hybrid thing. It was pretty fun to put it together and only took about 3 hours from beginning to end (when I was actually using it). There are a couple of pictures in the Computer album in Picasa, which you should be able to access on the right side of the page.

Second, my last rotation. I'm in a bioinformatics lab, which means I've been doing all of my work on the computer and haven't done any wet lab work, and I probably won't do much if any. So far it's going pretty well. It'll be a fun 10 weeks, but I don't think I'll end up there. The people are nice and the work's pretty good, but I think I like biology more than computer science. I'll most likely end up using bioinformatics somewhere in my research, so I'm glad I'm doing this. Also, I'm happy that I ended up picking the right field (every so often I wonder if I should have done computer science instead).

Third, rediscovering Pandora. Again. I come back to Pandora every so often when I'm looking for a variety of music and don't have access to (or don't want to listen to) regular radio. I was thinking "hmm I like Jason Mraz, and Gavin DeGraw, and The Killers... oh and look! Pandora has a new 'Add Variety' button on their radio stations. That's cool, let's try it." And it's awesome. The only problem is that it makes it hard to get work done because I like having music on, but I can't really read with music going anymore. I think my multitasking abilities are mostly shot after having to have singular focus for studying/lab work. It's actually a bit hard to type this and listen as well, so if there are spelling/grammar mistakes, I blame that.

Finally, apparently my healthy eating and very minor amounts of exercise have fought down the blood pressure to reasonable, healthy levels. I still want it to stay there so I should probably upgrade that "very minor" to "daily" at some point, hopefully soon.

Yay.

(Edit: also, I got level 80 on WoW sometime over the course of the last week and I've been grinding through quests in Northrend to get 5000 gold for flight training. Just got it today, but now I need more for a mount! Whee the ever-going all-consuming cycle of MMOs.

And on a different note, I discovered that I now know enough CSS to fiddle with this page layout! There MAY be a page redesign in the future! I'd say distant future rather than near, though, judging by my average motivation levels.)