Wooo, I am Bonnaroo bound! Or I will be, in about 25 minutes.

SO NERVOUS. And excited. But I'm so nervous about the flight and everything, and forgetting stuff, and blahhh.

Anyway, just wanted to post that I'm leaving for Bonnaroo and so won't be around LJ until next Tuesday. I'm going to be tweeting from Bonnaroo so watch my Twitter if you want to hear anything about 'roo. (There's a Twitter widget on my userinfo if you're not already following me.)

BONNAROOOOOOOOOO!

just saw the trailer for the Beatles Rock Band...

THE PANTS!

THE PANTS ARE IN THE GAME!

THE. PANTS

Even apart from the pants it looks SO AMAZING I CAN'T BELIEVE IT. I SO CANNOT WAIT

One advantage of the new way Twitter is handling @replies is that it is a little less obvious how embarrassingly often I talk to celebrities. Ummm. Yeah.

On that note: Ashton Kutcher RTed something that I also said, and I said it like two hours before the person he RTed said it. Bah! lollll

I am so behind in TV watching.

Things I need to watch:

• the last 14 episodes of Ugly Betty. augh.
• the entire last season of Chuck
• the Doctor Who Easter special
• the last 3 episodes of LOST
• the last 12 or 13 or so episodes of Greek
• the pilot of Glee
• 6 episodes of the Office...I saw the last two but not the 6 before them

And maybe other stuff that I'm forgetting. Augh. Why can't any of this stuff be repeated? I watch a lot of TV in the mornings/early afternoons and late at night but I want to just curl up on the couch with a blanket. I don't want to sit at my desk and watch stuff on my laptop screen, and it's too much work to hook the laptop up to the TV. So I watch a lot of TV and yet I'm still behind in all these shows.

omg you guys.

I am officially graduated.

AHHHHHHH.

Details on the ceremony and stuff later or tomorrow or something, I just wanted to announce this, haha.

So last night a bunch of us had a little potluck, which was quite fun. I made these baked club sandwich rollup things...sort of like garbage bread only stuffed with cheese, ham, turkey, and bacon. To my thinking that is not a true garbage bread but some people thought it was, so idk. And then I made a chocolate chip peanut butter torte thing that was also quite delicious.

Much fun was had by all, and then Max and I went to see a midnight (actually 12:40) showing of Star Trek (in IMAX!).

( oh. my. GOD. hopefully non-spoilery. )

So if any of you are Trekkers at ALL, you seriously need to see the movie. And if you're not - still go see it! There are some things that are sort of inside jokes for the people who are familiar with the series, but they worked hard to make sure it was still accessible and still made sense to anyone who's new to it, and I think they pulled it off. In my opinion, if you like any sort of action-type movie, you'll like it, even if you know nothing about Star Trek going into it.

So I have about ten thousand pictures I haven't uploaded yet, and I was going to do some of those tonight and instead I am too lazy. But here are the rest of my pics from the Fall Out Boy concert. I only took a few because I didn't care about the other bands and I didn't want to have my camera out the entire time anyway...and you already saw my best pic from the night...but here are a few more.

( woop woop )

I just made some adorable shrinky-dink things.

( yay! )

No idea what I'm going to do with them. Especially the headphones, since they were too small to put any holes in. Oh well.

Tiny Things I Hate: People who say "Hello?" after I do when I answer the phone

RINGRINGRINGRINGRING
Me: Hello?
Caller: HELLO?

....really? What am I supposed to say now? When I say hello, that is usually the point when you identify yourself and your reason for calling. If you just parrot back "hello?!" then...there's really nothing I can do. All I can do is just say hello again in a somewhat confused/annoyed tone. If you're calling me, you've got all the information here, you're going to have to start this conversation. Unless you want me to just start us off on some random topic, but then you're going to have a hell of a time bringing the conversation back around to whatever you were calling about.

RINGRINGRINGRINGRING
Me: Hello?
Caller: HELLO?
Me: Yes, hi, my name's Melanie and I'm just answering my phone today to tell you that I've recently purchased some new underpants and I'm wearing them presently and as such I am having one of those awkward days where you're in a good mood because you're aware that you've got super cute unders on but nobody else is aware so you seem to be in a good mood for no reason.
Caller: Uh...okay....anyway......about your insurance policy...?

That's hardly efficient. And yes, I know telemarketer type people may be working with an autodialer so THEIR phone just rang when I picked mine up, but still, you know how this works, how hard is it to pick up the phone and immediately say "Hi, I'm so and so and I'm calling to try to convince you to give me money"? And I've had normal non-telemarketer people do it too and that just makes NO sense.

So I finally got all caught up with Heroes! Woo! I was really having a hard time finding any interest in it so it took me forever to catch up. But I was so looking forward to Bryan Fuller's return that I powered through it. I watched three episodes on Sunday night and another two Monday evening before the new one aired, so now I'm up to date. I was wondering if I was getting my hopes up too much for Fuller's return but...I absolutely was not! The show got better IMMEDIATELY with him back. The humor he injects into it is very evident, and that's one of the things that was sorely lacking during the time he was gone, but there are other bits of awesomeness that I can recognize as his touches. There are still a few things that need to be cleaned up - there are some storylines and weird character developments that are boring or annoying or both and they need to be tied up and/or changed gradually in order for it to seem believable/natural, so even with him back they can't get fixed instantaneously. But there was still a major improvement from the first episode he was back, and I'm so amazed that one person can have so much effect on the show.

In other news, I found the littlest duck! This was actually almost a week ago but I forgot to mention it. I have these three little rubber ducks on my desk, a big one, a medium one, and a little one. And I lost the littlest duck a long time ago - one of my cats stole it and I couldn't find it ANYWHERE. I honestly think it's been a year that it's been lost, and I just found it under my bed. I have looked under my bed for it SO many times, so I don't know how I missed it, but it was sort of crammed behind some stuff in the corner.

I GOT IT!

I finally figured out the CSS for that website I was working on.

WOOOOOOO.

HEY I AM BORED.

And it is late enough that I don't feel like starting a major project of any sort.

WHAT DO I DOOOO.

Also: are any of you people good with CSS? I have this annoying problem that I CANNOT FIX and I feel like I've tried everything. I've googled everything I can think of and found a few things online that are referring to this exact problem, but even when I try their solutions nothing changes. Not sure if I'm missing some other difference between their code and mine or if it's a slightly different problem that's presenting itself the same way.

( the problem if anyone cares )

Anyway, what else is new?

BLAHHHH BORED.

Ugh.

It just occurred to me that I hadn't checked my yahoo email in a long time. It's not my primary email address, it's the one I use for anything spammy, but it's also the one I give out online and use to sign up for stuff, so I usually check it fairly often. Somehow I let it go for a long time without meaning to.

Among the things I wish I had seen sooner:

• An offer from someone to help with something I needed help with a while back...I got what I needed anyway but I wish I'd seen it so I could have thanked her for the offer!
• Three different emails about the Roo Clues site with guesses and/or compliments.
• An email from Borders about $5 in free Borders bucks.

Argh.

I think studying is stupid.

There, I said it. Actually, it's more like I think situations which require studying are stupid. In my opinion, if you have to study for a test, it's a sign of one of two things:

1. The test (and/or subject matter as a whole) is poorly designed.
2. You have not been doing the necessary work previously in the course.

And it's usually the first one. It seems like any time a test requires studying, the teacher got lazy while they were making it. Studying usually implies memorization - you need to review material to make sure you remember certain terms, formulas, dates, names, whatever. And I don't think an exam should ever test memorization like that. It has no real-world application, it's not the intended focus of the course, and it's usually at the expense of the intended focus.

I ran into this a lot when I was taking computer science courses. There were times when I had to write out (by hand) short programs or snippets of code. That is so incredibly useless. There is no reason for me to remember all of that syntax - when I'm actually programming something the environment I'm using can prompt most of the syntax for me, and even if I'm not using something like that I can just look in the documentation or google it or something. They should be testing on the general concepts and theories and models of thought, not syntax.

Or think of a history exam - I'm sure everyone had the sorts of quizzes and tests in high school where you had to try to memorize a huge list of dates, names, places, or something like that. I'm fairly certain I remember a quiz where we were given the various "alphabet soup" acronyms from the Great Depression and had to come up with what they stood for. Now, really, what in the HELL is the point of that?! All you really need to know about that stuff is the general idea - a bunch of organizations were set up to provide jobs to people who were unemployed while simultaneously building some bridges and cleaning some stuff up and the like. But clearly some teacher decided that just writing the acronyms on a sheet of paper was way easier than formulating actual questions, so there you go, there's your quiz.

If tests actually tested on the things they SHOULD - general ideas, concepts, theories, etc. - you wouldn't really need to study. If you learned that stuff the first time you would remember it and you wouldn't really need to review anything.

So what does anyone else think? Can anyone convince me that there are situations when studying should be necessary?

Alright, my new layout might be as done as it's going to get....so everyone go check it out! =)

I still need to play with a few of the more unusual tags - at least the bulleted list and probably the numbered list and the block quote and...some other stuff, maybe.

I also still have a few issues with it, so if anyone happens to have any idea how to fix anything, I'd love to hear it.

( problems! )

So, I have been a really bad LJer lately.

For quite a while now I've been reeeallly bad about checking my f-list, and then I just noticed last night that the entry I posted was the first one in like...almost two weeks. Um.

So, major apologies for not paying attention to anyone else. I finally gave in and set up a filter so I can see my flist without all the communities on there, which makes it WAY more manageable. So now I can check all of your lovely updates easily and only bother sorting through the comms if I have extra time on my hands. So I promise I'll be a better LJer and I'm sorry if I missed anything humongously important in your lives!

Also, I finally got around to making a major list of all of the movies I want to see so I can start making my way through them, SO, I'm looking for recommendations. What movies do YOU think I should see? I seem to like things that are hard to fit into categories (Big Fish, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Garden State) and I like stupid comedies and chick flicks and stuff. But I'm also trying to watch more of those movies that everybody should see, because it is just ridiculous how many of those sorts of movies I haven't seen and I'm trying to remedy that. So just name whatever you can think of - your favorites, stuff I might like, stuff you think everybody should see, whatever.

Blah.

So, the lineup for Roo may have just been leaked about an hour ago. We can't really tell if it's fake or not because it's better than a lot of fakes but it's still a bit suspicious.

It seems a bit big for an initial announcement and it's very very topheavy. It was also listed all out of order which seems really weird to me - it's not like a random-order list would exist anywhere, so I don't know how it would end up like that. And there were some misspellings, but that could be explained by someone copying it from somewhere or something. Maybe.

It's got Deadmau5 on it which seems weird to me too - we thought Deadmau5 was the answer to one of our clues and it turns out he's not, so it would be somewhat coincidental if he was on the lineup anyway.

Apart from being topheavy, it looks pretty realistic. Lots of stuff that was rumored or hoped for, some of the stuff we knew from solving clues, the stuff that's already been leaked, etc.

I'm inclined to think it may be legit, but I don't know. Mostly I don't WANT it to be. It's a stellar lineup to be sure, but it's just not anything that excited me personally. Jenny Lewis is on there, and Los Campesinos!, but those are about the only things I'm even remotely excited about. Then there's about a half dozen bands in the "been meaning to check them out" category. So 8 things I like to see on there - not really comparable to past years lineups. Blahhhhhhhhh.

Well, I have progressed past logo design to site design for my portfolio...

( ...and of course I need your helps again! )

I AM SLIGHTLY APPEASED.

So, that lad up there, Matt Smith, is the new Doctor Who. I'm quite happy! I think he was my favorite out of the possibilities. He was the only one I looked at and immediately thought "there, that's the Doctor." Something about him is just right - but I was afraid that that made him the obvious choice and that they wanted to do something unexpected. Along the somewhat unexpected path, Chiwetel Ejiofor could have done well, although Smith looks more like the Doctor to me. I'm really happy they didn't go with a female Doctor.

So, woo! All things considered, this could have been much worse. I'm sort of excited to see the next series now.

Edit: Oh, I forgot that I also wanted to mention my enjoyment of the fact that the new Doctor's last name is Smith.