Good Week

I found myself unaccountably and unusually happy yesterday. Starbucks gave away free brewed coffee to every customer who brought in a travel mug, and I took advantage of that promotion before I left for work, which meant that I was sipping on an inordinate amount of coffee all day long. I've found that, oddly, caffeine tends to make me feel sanguine, so perhaps that's what spurred my happiness. Additionally, over the past two days, prospective students [high school seniors] have been visiting Rice for the annual "Owl Days" event. I love witnessing their eagerness and awe as they experience college--for many, it's the college they've already decided to attend--firsthand for the first time. I miss that feeling. Prospective students, or prospies, as we call them, always make me smile. It has also helped that in just the past eight days, I've:

1. Gotten my new cute netbook
2. Decided to go to Imogen Heap's concert--and purchased tickets for said concert!
3. Decided to go see John Mayer AND Owl City (it's like my dream come true!) in concert
4. Had dinner with an amazing group of friends who always have me laughing like a maniac and feeling loved
5. Booked a trip to New York City to visit a friend right after graduation
6. Had a ridiculously good end-of-college night on campus

Ostensibly, it's been a relatively good week. Then again, it's also been an unpleasant week in many ways. A friend of mine from high school passed away on Easter, and I went to his funeral and wake this past weekend. I've been to too many funerals for people my age, but this was the first one for a person I could truly call my friend. I have a lot of memories with this guy [granted, they're mostly from middle school, and thus at least 8 years old], and he was truly a nice person. I'm still sad about his death, but more than anything it's made me painfully aware of how precious my own life is.

It's amazing how forcefully perspective can be pushed upon you--and also how easily it can slip away.

New Toy!

I'm writing this on my new netbook, a yellow Samsung N150. See below for a visual aid:

(photo cred: http://tinyurl.com/y7uo6zp)

I've wanted a netbook pretty much ever since they first came out, so I'm really excited about this one. It has a 10.1" screen and is, well, super cute. I got this netbook in preparation for medical school. I've had my old laptop (an IBM thinkpad that's solid, but a bit of a clunker) for about five years now, and it's definitely time to upgrade, especially since the harddrive on my IBM is woefully small. My lovely father has decided to get me both a netbook and a laptop for medical school. I know the expense may seem a bit over the top, but I won my first laptop (the IBM) in a scholarship contest, so I figure the amount of money I would have spent on that first one for college can be spread over to my new netbook and laptop.

Anyway, while I'm super excited to have an adorbes new netbook, I have to say there are a few things I'm not so jazzed about. To run through my reaction:

Things I Love

• It's so small!
• Hello, it's freaking yellow! (the inside is white)
• It has a sweet mousepad (wait, what do you call the mice on laptops? Touch...mouses?), that pretty much does all the cool things that Apple products do with their touchscreens: scrolling with two fingers, zooming in and zooming out when you make the corresponding motions with your fingers, and even rotating photos when you make, again, the prescribed motion with your fingers.
• Its speakers are pretty sweet, especially compared to the ones on my previous laptop, which were, like the harddrive, a bit woeful.
• It has a built-in webcam! I totally did NOT have that on my previous laptop, so I'm pretty excited about being able to, you know, video chat and take mirror image photos of myself and whatever.

Things I Don't Love

• Because this netbook, like all netbooks, runs on an Intel Atom processor, I can only run Windows 7 Starter on it, and not the full version of Windows 7. When my dad and I were looking at netbooks online, I thought Windows 7 Starter was just some sort of trial version, that you could upgrade your OS later on once you had bought the netbook. Yeah, I was wrong. Windows 7 Starter is apparently designed for low-process (or something) computers, and it has some limited functionality. For example:
• I CANNOT CHANGE MY DESKTOP WALLPAPER. You have no idea how much this bothers me. This was the first thing I was excited to do once I began playing with my netbook (I should name it...), to make it my own and personalize it in some way. But yeah. You're not allowed to change the desktop background if you're running the Windows 7 Starter OS. Why they limited that function, I have no idea. I don't imagine it takes so much out of your processor to just display a photo other than the standard issue one as your wallpaper. But yeah. Since this was the first thing I wanted to do, and it was also the first disappointment I had with my netbook, I find it incredibly irksome. This initial disappointment led me to see other things I'm not terribly fond of on this netbook. Which kind of sucks. [seeing the disappointments, not the netbook itself]
• I feel like even though its screen is the standard size for netbooks, 10.1", mine doesn't seem quite as small as the ones I've seen before. Maybe I'm just being silly. In fact, hopefully I am.
• The battery on this guy is definitely a little bulky. The other netbooks I've seen, mostly Acer and Asus and HP ones, seem to be sleek overall, pretty planar with no bumps or anything, but the battery on mine sticks out a bit, which I imagine would make fitting it neatly into a sleeve a bit difficult.

All in all, though, despite my few disappointments, I'm still quite excited about my brand new netbook. I'll get over the unchanging desktop eventually, and on the bright side, I can still have a slideshow of photos as my screensaver. I'm sure this is the start of a beautiful relationship.