this was my lunch, which i ate in my bedroom with my space heater on full blast. on cold days like today, i basically spend all my waking hours holed up in the warm cocoon of my bedroom. the only time i do go into the living room is either to get something, to stretch my legs, or check the doorstep for packages. back to the space heater: i noticed it a few days ago, but when it oscillates, on one of its sweep cycle it makes a faint clicking noise. this might not bother a normal person, but it drives me absolutely insane. a quick internet search revealed this to be a common problem with bionaire products. i was ready to return the damn thing but after fumbling with the heater i managed to make it quiet again.

my internal dvd burner arrived today ($25). i removed the old drive from a spare external burner and replaced it with the new one. the only reason why i upgraded was so i could burn dual layer (DL) discs. after i had the new burner assembled, i tested it with several burns. the first attempt failed; not really the burner's fault, it was vibrating so much that it fell off my computer while burning, thereby ruining the session. the second attempt worked flawlessly and verified without any problems. the next two burns were successful but came up with verification errors near the end. i gave my computer a restart and began burning again; the next 6 discs came out fine without errors.

i've decided to discreetly put up my christmas lights inside the house, for my own personal enjoyment. they just seem to make the place appear more festive, particularly during these dark winter days. i can't wait for my other lights to arrive: i'm going to string them all up and totally go crazy before putting them to use as grow lights.

as if problems with the heater and burner weren't enough, my macbook pro decided to die on me tonight. for whatever reason, the machine just wouldn't restart, instead showing me a blank screen. the hard disk wasn't even spinning, and the only thing that was on was the sleep light, and even that wasn't blinking. i was really afraid it might've be something wrong with the LCD (or worse, the motherboard itself) and tried to do the math in my head to see if i was still under the 90 day warranty since my last repair. i tried every possible keyboard combination to restart the laptop and zap any internal settings but none of them worked. it didn't have anything to do with the battery or the power supply. finally, exhausted of all other ideas, i decided to open up the machine and remove the 2gb memory i installed more than 2 months ago. sure enough, apparently that was the problem, as my macbook booted up just fine after i removed the memory. i tried doing some slot swapping but the culprit was already that memory. i filled out the paperwork and will be returning the bad memory for an exchange (i got it from 18004memory.com).

i had some toaster oven pizza rolls for dinner before taking a bath reading the latest issue of entertainment weekly. later in the evening i had some ramen in a cup.