Breakfast Around the World. For the record, I’ve never seen a single Australian person ever eat toast with tinned spaghetti on top. The Snook assures me, however, that bogans do this. It boggles the mind.

What Animal Would Your Daemon Settle As?
I haven’t done a silly quiz in a long time. Here’s my result:

My MONKEY DAEMON represents a nature that is admired, detail-oriented, and full of curiosity. Some people might call me self-absorbed. I like to plan ahead, and hone my various talents to perfection.

I’m not sure that describes me perfectly, but hey, monkeys are cute and funny! A monkey daemon would rock, as long as it wasn’t a scary evil monkey like Mrs. Coulter’s. (Link courtesy of Marci, who is a hare.)

If you have no idea what I’m talking about, “daemons” are from Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials books. Even if you haven’t read them, you’ll learn about them when the movie comes out in a couple years.

Hey, I made an appearance in Nora‘s Personal Internet History! She recounts the night sophomore year in college when I got puke-drunk for the first time ever and tried to teach her HTML. Good times.

I was just exceedingly happy to learn that the upcoming RENT movie will star nearly all the original Broadway cast. *sigh* Then when it comes out on DVD I’ll be able to watch Adam Pascal 24/7 from the comfort of my own home…

How cool. Karen Allen, of Raiders of the Lost Ark fame, is teaching a knitting course in Massachusetts next month! I think the class name – “The Yoga of Knitting” – is pretty cheesy, but it sounds like a pretty fun workshop. (Link courtesy of Brigita, who should totally go and tell us all about it afterwards.)

Good grief. It’s going to be 90 degrees out today. The Snook’s gotta work… So dare I brave a trip to the beach on my own?

Damn. I was all happy this morning because AppleCentre Broadway was able to verify that my two-month-old iPod’s hard disk had indeed died, and they gave me a shiny brand new replacement. (Brand new! I was expecting a refurb.) So I just plugged it in to set it up and iTunes started accessing the Music Store. A splash screen informed me that, as a new iPod owner, I got 13 free songs! (That offer definitely wasn’t there two months ago.) The only catch? You have to have an account… and there’s no Australian music store. I’ve got no cards with a US address. My British cards now have Aussie addresses. I got nothin’. So I got a tantalizing offer of 13 free songs, only to have it jerked out from under me. That sucks!

Update: I must’ve been seriously tempting the gods there, claiming that my inability to download some free shit constituted serious suckage. Because guess what? The last two hours have seriously sucked.The new iPod started syncing but then froze after a few songs… just like the old one did. I cursed my bad luck at getting two bum iPods in a row. The Snook suggested I try it with the iBook just to see what happened, and lo and behold, it synced just fine! What’s more, hooking it up to the iMac using USB also worked perfectly! Which meant, of course, that the problem wasn’t in my measly $400 iPod, but in my new $3000 computer. Shite. Even weirder, DeskCam is also Firewire and it’s still working perfectly. So I tried booting from the “Techtool Deluxe” troubleshooting CD that came with my AppleCare. The computer wouldn’t boot from it. It just spun and spun. We did a hard reboot. The computer came up and then the video flashed all jaggedy and crap. I freaked out. I jumped on the iBook and started surfing the Apple Support site. I noticed that they have this new thing where you chat live with a technician. I fired it up and “Charlie” helped us reset the “NVRAM,” which fixed the whole video issue. (Apparently it was a result of all the hard reboots.) Unfortunately Charlie bailed on the chat before he could work out what was wrong with my Firewire. So I did some more digging. And guess what? I’m not the only one with this problem. It appears to be caused by the 10.3.7 update. Makes sense, and it jibes with the time that my iPod problem suddenly appeared. I’ve repaired permissions and deleted some of the preferences suggested by that discussion, but syncing via Firewire on the G5 still hangs. (I was able to get it to do one song at a time manually, but anything more dies after a couple.) So for now, I’m using USB and it’s flying along. I guess I’ll just wait, covet my brand new iPod, and see if this gets remedied in the next update, huh?

Oh, and now I’m wondering if I should tip off the AppleCentre guys that my old iPod, which they thought was dead (since their computer couldn’t recognize it), might actually be perfectly functional, and it’s just that Firewire + G5 + 10.3.7 = Sucks Ass.

Sad Confession: I would totally drive this car. My Dad actually had to talk me out of stenciling flowers on my beater in high school. This is why I don’t have a nice car (or any car, for that matter).

Whoa. My story about Angora Man has been linked on a “fluffy” forum! The commenters actually seem pretty nice about it. I guess that explains where this last comment came from!

You learn something new every day. Horses can’t vomit. That’s slightly reassuring, given that the Snook and I are planning on riding some this weekend…