The Festival turns 300 in a little less than 365 days, which isn't too bad of an average. It's been a wild and crazy ride that doesn't look to be ending anytime soon.

I come at you live from a much-less-cluttered desk at Apartment 12. My flat-panel monitor takes up a fraction of the space, and I can finally use my computer like a CS major again rather than having to only run one program at a time. Some cheers and jeers for the setup process:

Cheers to Dell for shipping everything quickly and for a great new case design. If you haven't experienced the new black cases that open like a book, you will love the improvement over their grey predecessors. I installed a 2nd hard drive, which was a snap since Dell provided extra mounting brackets (in a cool bright-green color!). No more hard disks dangling from IDE cables for me.

Jeers also to Dell for installing AOL (6 months of free service!!!!!!111) in about 3 different places along with about 10 shortcuts to them. The worst offense was that upon clicking on My Computer, here was my list of devices: Hard Disk, 2nd Hard Disk, webcam, DVD drive, CDRW drive, Zip drive, AOL. For some reason they felt it necessary to install AOL (not a shortcut, but the actual program) in a special section marked "Other Devices".

Jeers to Microsoft for their wack "security features". Upon browsing the 2nd hard drive after installation, I found that I couldn't access the My Documents folder because MS decided to have built-in security to prevent unauthorized users from accessing my files, and since the drive was in a new computer under a different OS (XP Home instead of Pro), it decided to prevent me from accessing my own files. After rebooting in Safe Mode, "seizing ownership of the folders", and jumping through some other unnecessary hoops in order to regain access to my own files, I question how the security on my own stuff is this tight, yet every single week there is another security announcement about some sort of huge hole in Outlook or IE.

So Apartment 12 studios is finally open for business. The day has finally arrived where I can record my Sk8r Boi cover.