I got a dollar!, I got a dollar!…

Quick, what’s the number for 911?

No? :shrug: Sorry.

I made $75 and a box of chocolates today. It’s nice to live in a digital world where 95% of people don’t know IDE from USB from PCMCIA (People can’t memorize computer industry acronyms…). Nice because people will pay you if you do know and can explain things to them in English.

I fixed up my old drumming instructor’s laptop today, got his daughter’s Sandisk PlaysForSure MP3 player set up for him, reenabled Autoplay for his CDROM drive (How the hell did that get turned off? Note to geeks: Don’t forget TweakUI in your toolkit.), repaired a failed Juno (eww) upgrade which left his desktop “Juno Internet” shortcut pointing to “C:Documents and SettingsSteveLocal SettingsTempPleaseWait.exe” (and doing just that), checked over his Dell Jukebox synchronization, freed up some wasted clock cycles with HijackThis (The only anti-spyware, anti-msmsgs.exe, anti-qttask.exe, anti-bullshit tool you’ll ever need, except for Rootkit Revealer in the future), and generally tidied up. Then we walked through the process of picking out a new Dell desktop for his home office. It was nice to talk with him again and see how the world is going. He’s an amazing guy.

On a completely unrelated topic, the human brain is mind-boggling. (lol, that’s weird to think about.) I was driving to Wal-Mart to negotiate a CD exchange when U2’s “Where the Streets Have No Name” came up on the radio. I’ve heard the UW MadHatters’ version of this song before on the CD I bought my sister for her birthday, but I’d never heard the real U2 version. If you’ve never heard the song, it has this really long intro before the vocals come in. Well, I didn’t immediately recognize it on the radio because it was different enough from the MadHatters’ version, so I was just driving down the highway trying to figure out what this song was. Then my brain jumped ahead to the vocals and the first couple bars of that were going through my head against the instrumental intro on the radio. Then the vocals started on the radio and I suddenly realized what my brain was doing… even though I was consciously still trying to figure out where I knew the song from, subconsciously my brain knew the answer and was already running through the lyrics. To the point that hearing the lyrics on the radio gave me a brief sense of deja vu. It was weird, but really cool to have this sudden :snap: when my conscious realized what my subconscious was doing and the two shared some information for a change.

I don’t know if that made any sense, but basically the human brain is an amazing analytical machine and I was awed by it today.