Dear Diary #71: College Textbook Paperweights, Mic'd Interviewers

Dear Diary,

It appears that I am finally learning: bought a bunch of books that I read through from cover to cover, and instead of sitting on them, I'm selling them while they're still "recent." Made the mistake during college of sitting on every textbook that I used for courses for years. The idea was they would become useful at some point in the future -- one or two books were useful in the sense that I flipped them open to one or two pages once or twice. One or two out of over a dozen books. By the time I was ready to part with them, they were two or three editions behind, and no one wanted them for even burning. Even textbook donation places didn't want anything beyond a certain age. And now I'm sitting on a 30 lb Banker's  Box full of textbooks I can't sell and will probably end up in a recycling depot.

So, I was trying to sell something using online classifieds again. The deal was done, we were actually supposed to meet already but something came up -- thank goodness, in retrospect. Then in trying to organize a new time, we do some talking, and it becomes apparent that my buyer doesn't seem to understand the word "used" and why the price is 50% lower than retail.

Updating the Windows and it failed for some reason, so I gave it another shot. Progress bar wasn't moving so I thought it failed again and was ready to restart and try again. Oh, it didn't fail, it was in the middle of working except the progress bar was stuck on task 1 of x while it was really on 2 of x.

Starting to get annoyed that the letters i and L and the number 1 look the exact same depending on capitalization. It's usually not a problem because you have vowels and consonants in regular words. But I've been reading computer stuff and there are commands that use a string of vowels or consonants together. Half the time, I can't figure out if it's an L, i, or a 1. Best password ever has to be lll111IIIII11IIlllllIIIIlll111.

Watching an interview online and really appreciating the fact that they mic'd the interviewer. There are a lot that don't then they have to use subtitles for that bit or just ignore it completely -- I "rewind" and give up after two or three tries.

Later.