Dear Diary #69: Zero Crossings, Dumb Phones, Excel for notes

Dear Diary,

That feeling when you think something's crawling on your skin but you ignore it because there's usually nothing there when you check... Then you check it because it doesn't go away and there's actually an insect there. You know because you accidentally mashed it into your fingers.

Watching a video on YouTube, it finishes playing and there's a pop... Kind of annoying, but I found it more disconcerting when I heard it and immediately thought that it was probably because someone didn't cut the clip at a zero crossing in the audio. Feels wrong to even have an idea of the underlying technical issue.

Did my once in a few months look at dumb phones since my seven year phone may go at any time. So, the cheapest dumb phone on my carrier is $100 while my current phone was about $60 seven years ago. I'm mainly looking for a Nokia, the updated indestructible model because it seems like the perfect option for people like me who keep the same phone for seven years and up. My carrier doesn't appear to carry it yet. Boo.

This is weird and wrong. I'm taking "school" notes using Excel. That's like a total misuse of the software. It just kind of happened: I was mainly making a few charts for study notes. Then I wanted to take lecture notes and didn't want to have things split across multiple files, so that happened. In graduate school when I finally had a laptop to take to class, I used Word -- used to use a laptop at work to take notes too using Word. Total travesty and I may start doing this from now on because there are an "infinite" number of rows. Everything is a table so I don't need to insert tables anywhere, I can write extra notes anywhere and not have to turn a section into columns. Then there are math functions. Word don't do math so well -- it can, just takes a lot more work.

Watching a movie on a TV channel and the audio keeps cutting in and out, except it's not full sound to no sound. It's full-ish sound, to a lot quieter sound, then back and forth a bunch of times. Not the first time, only seems to show up during movies. Haven't seen the problem with TV shows and cartoons on the same network. Can't tell if someone couldn't figure out how to do dynamic compression or if it's some form of DRM to destroy the quality. Glad I'm paying for this with my cable package...

And that HDD I installed months back that I said wasn't bothering me is bothering me a ton again now. It's not that it's loud, it's that it's on/off and on/off, not constant. The sound must be from resonance or vibration. Those rubber grommets clearly aren't working. Can't get that new SSD soon enough...

Later.