Perhaps most important is that on this campus, most of the other houses in this style have six students living in them. For some reason, my particular house had what was originally the kitchen transformed into a seventh bedroom and the kitchen was wedged into a corner of the common room. This makes everything just that more cramped and crowded. Also, there seems to be a lot of people who are adverse to washing their dishes. This is gross and something I can’t really understand. My feeling is that if you don’t want to clean up after yourself when you cook, get a meal plan. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, while many students in the same housing setup as me chose their housemates and petitioned to get this house as a group, I did not. I was randomly put into a house with other students, some of whom are very different from me. They might even have extremely annoying friends who come over a lot and sing showtunes. So it goes.

Often, especially when showtunes are being sung, I wish that I could live alone.

My dream solution to this problem: a Tumbleweed house.

You can read more about them and see pictures on Oprah’s website, but seriously, I wish I could just have one of these built on campus. I would be able to concentrate so much better because there would be no wannabe actresses in my living room to distract me from Dostoevsky.

I have been really into adding applications to my facebook which track my taste. Playing around with the Bookshelf and DVDShelf has become one of my favorite ways to pass time, obsessively tracking every book I’ve ever read or wanted to read and movie I’ve seen or wanted to see. I just added iLike, and after looking at the artists related to Jim Croce, I stumbled across something disturbing:

John Denver has been dead for ten years. How can he be playing a show in the New York City area?

But now I have stumbled upon something very, very upsetting.

So my regular iPod is 80gb. My computer’s harddrive is also 80gb. Logic follows that there is no way I could have a full ipod and a working computer if I kept everything that was on my ipod on my regular harddrive. Since iPods are known for Fucking Up, I purchased a 160gb external harddrive. I move everything onto that and delete it off my regular harddrive once I’ve transferred stuff to my iPod. Now, while I like my iPod, it is also really large and expensive. iPods are not good to take to the gym and they are also not-so-good for walking around with. While the case I have does have a clip, i don’t use it. I don’t even use the clip on the back of my blackberry holster. I just don’t trust them to protect such a large and expensive device from harm–like falling or theft.

I decided that the iPod Shuffle was the perfect solution. It’s small, the whole thing is a clip… it is designed for walking around/going to the gym. And it’s also much less expensive. Perfect! I went to Best Buy, bought a hot pink shuffle (I am glad that if I bought one before they switched the colors, because the new colors are all super-ugly and remind me of grunge and there is NO PINK to speak of ETA: I just found this so strike that last statement), and began using it. I found it very convenient and had no real complaints.

Until today. A couple of days ago while I was watching some legally downloaded through itunes Gossip Girl (ep. 2), my computer freaked out. I have been simultaneously really busy and really lazy, so while I transferred music and video to my iPod and to my external harddrive (sidenote: does anybody know if there is any way to enable .avi/non-iTunes Store video playback on iPods?), I have yet to actually delete anything from my computer. This was real foresight on my part, because while I watching Gossip Girl, my computer not only freaked out and required an emergency shutdown and restart, it also deleted my current itunes library file and replaced it with an older version. This was no big deal, as I still had all the files on my computer.

The problem came today, when I hooked my iPod shuffle up to my computer so I could charge it. iTunes told me that the library did not match the one on my shuffle, and did I want to sync them? I said “No.” Lo and behold, iTunes took this to mean that I wanted all the files on my iPod shuffle deleted. That sucked. Then it made me wonder, since disk use is not available for shuffle (the root of this whole problem), what does shuffle do when you have more than 1gb of music in your library? Is Apple assuming that if you have a shuffle you have less than 1gb of music, because otherwise you would have purchased a larger iPod?

Most people seem to solve this problem by designating a specific iPod shuffle playlist for their shuffle to sync from, which seems to be what I’m going to have to do. But still, I resent having to have that unnecessary 1gb of space being taken up on my computer. I have also read that disk space is also not enabled for iPod Touch, which is even worse. You have to use Terminal to change this with third party software.
This whole thing has gotten me so pissed off that I accidentally burned my grilled cheese sandwich. So I had to make a second one, which I promptly dropped on the floor.