'specially for the_xtina

20. Jill Hamburger
Best Buy

Jill Hamburger is vice president of gaming for Best Buy and has been with the company since 1987. As such she’s been a familiar face to publishers for many years. Her efforts in 2006 have sought to leverage the synergy between the new generation of consoles and Best Buy’s other great interest right now - home theater and HDTV. Best Buy has done a fine job in demo-ing games in their best environment thus pulling consumers towards games and HDTV at the same time. She has also been working on education initiatives, spending more time on in-store brochures and arranging an ESRB education program with the Boys & Girls Clubs of America.
Next-Gen's Top 25 People of the Year

Y'know, I'm pretty happy that so many women made it to the top 25 (#'s 25, 20, 17, 13, and 5), but why'd she have to go and "leverage the synergy"?!

Surreal...

I've decided that whenever I'm bored now I'm going to try and visit the Spanish Wikipedia and see what I can puzzle my way through. I can already read "subway Spanish," meaning simple phrases, small vocabulary, present tense; this is to help me with more vocabulary, and to see things in the proper context.

I started this evening with learning about the historical ways of classifying living things before the current three-kingdom ("reina") system, and then I hit Random Page (Pagina Aleatoria - just figuring out which was the random page link took a bit of puzzling). And ended up with an article (in Spanish) about a Japanese term. I should check out the English version just so I know WTF's going on. Or else just skip to something that I can understand better from the context.

Dream

Very complex one again. My Dad and I were trying to get into a museum? The Rotary was outside it, connected to The Boulevard. (I didn't realize there were street sets in my dreamscape.) We had to get on a subway, but the subway wasn't stopping at that station. In fact, it was passing through the passengers standing on the platform. Some of them were slightly injured in the process. My Dad couldn't fly so I flew to the next station, it was The Elevated Station. No tangible trains there either, though someone had gotten third degree burns by one passing through her, so they were getting more real. I flew to the next station, The Underground Station. Also no real trains. Well, Dad could fly, but only by putting one foot in front of the other exactly like he was walking on air, so he was limited by how fast he could walk and I could fly faster than that. And we had to get back to ??? which was three piers away or so, too far to walk easily, so I was scouting out other methods of transport so Dad could get there.

I went back above ground and somehow found a bus being driven by one of my students, standing next to him was kadath. At first I wasn't sure it was her, she was really short, had curly dark brown hair, big rimmed glasses, and a white sweatshirt, but then we both said "hi". I found myself thinking half outside the dream "ah, we were supposed to meet tonight so I guess this is instead." I asked my student / the driver to try and find my Dad and we stopped outside a coffeeshop that was also some sort of ethnic food resturaunt. The driver stopped really close to the building, on the sidewalk, so the doors could barely open so the other passengers wouldn't get out. We didn't want them to know I was picking up my Dad and we'd kinda hijacked the bus route. I went inside the shop and found Dad in the back, yelled and waved at him that I'd found a bus, and he came out.

Gabe progress

The good news post-neighbor-visit this time is that Gabe can fly up to 3 feet horizontally, to a surface at the same height. I don't see any new flight feathers and although a tail feather is growing in they give control not lift, so he must be gaining wing strength. Happy! :)

The bad news is that he's yelling near continually. I'm not sure if he's bored of his food, or if he misses Maria's budgies. :-\

Space, the computer's frontier

Holy shucking fit! I was trying to download some free things from the iTunes store, and it says my hard drive is full. My 70-Gig HD on my desktop. I don't download porn unlike some people I know. I don't download movies like others. I only have a 20-Gig iPod and I think I only own around 30 Gigs of music. Windows and Office and Warcraft III don't take up 40 Gigs. I'm going to run a defrag overnight, but that won't figure out the problem for me.

Help me out here folks. I've already gone and cleared out temp files. I went into my iTunes folder and there were a bunch of .tmp files there too that seem to have cleared up a couple freakin' GIGS of space. I am suspicious that it's a fucked up iTunes library, but I'm not sure how to fix it. I've seen visualization programs for the Mac that allow you to see how much disk space is allocated to different programs, is there one for the PC (Win XP)?

*grumble grumble* I didn't notice anything that looked like spyware when I ran the Task Manager, so I think I'm safe there. What else can I do to figure out (a) where my space's gone, and (b) how to stop gap in until I can figure it out?

Thanks in advance for any help.

ETA: Ugh, Disk Defragmenter says I can't run the defrag effectively b/c I now have only 6% of the disk free (5 Gigs) and it wants at least 15%. *grumble*

Holy Shit....

So taking a look thru my C: drive w/ Easy Cleaner, I found a folder titled "Ddrive" that apparently was a backup copy of my old D drive when I had a drive fail and moved things around. I told Windows to move it all back to the D drive w/o looking inside. Ten minutes later I checked on the progress and it said 36 minutes left, and currently moving blah.mp3. I watched blankly for a few minutes as it continued to move mp3's. Then I realized what was going on.

Before iTunes, I used WinAmp, and kept all my mp3's on my D drive. I probably imported them into iTunes at some point, but they got lost, as I'd been noticing for a while that I don't seem to have all the mp3's in iTunes that I know I used to have. Well I found them.

I killed the transfer, and am going to put them into iTunes. I also want to figure out how to rebuild the library, kill old libraries, and possibly keep the library on the D drive, we'll see, but that'll be in a while. I still want to try to defrag tonight.

Thanks for all the help the_xtina! :)