Tuesday, November 06, 2007

Crashing and Goofing

I haven't been getting a lot done lately. This is partly due to an external hard drive crash which left me with a damaged partition and also left me unable to access most of my programs for a day or so, and also due to a vague unfocused feeling that has been lingering. I think I just burned myself out on designing for a bit, concentrating so much on it this past month. Or it could just be a seasonal malaise.

I've got lots of things I could be working on. Even things I should be working on. But mostly I've just been goofing around. The day that the hard drive crashed, in an effort to soothe my nerves till Doug got home, I got some friends from ndisb and digishoptalk to play iSketch with me (it's like online Pictionary). Here's my attempt to draw "mouthwash":



I also had some fascinating, frustrating fun with FreeRice.com. It's a word-defining game. After you answer a few questions it gives you a vocabulary level (40, if you don't miss any of the first words), and then after that you go up a level for every three words you get right, but down a level every time you miss one. I played it off and on for a good part of the day and finally got up to level 50 (the highest level).



It was interesting to see how many words I didn't know but was able to guess correctly, just from the way they sounded, or sometimes from the way the answers were worded. I also learned that a tartuffe is not a sea slug.

We got a new hard drive and were able to recover most of the data on the damaged partition with http://www.file-recovery.net/ . Whew! I suppose I'll have to get back to work.

6 comments:

Molly Newman said...

A tartuffe is a hypocrite, right? Like the Moliere play? Just guessing here... I've never seen so many words not in common use as I did at FreeRice.com.

Anonymous said...

Ouch! Having a hard drive crash is so not good. We lost our whole computer and had to do the file/drive recovery thing too.

Hope all is better now. Love the mouthwash drawing. Too cute!

Anonymous said...

I'm glad your hard drive was recoverable. I finally convinced Kendell to get an external hard drive and I sleep much better knowing my files are backed up. Is that weird?

The rice game...Haley and I played it for a solid hour last week. She kept saying "Mom, how'd you know that word?" and honestly, lots of times I'm not sure how I knew the word! I think I was at 45 or 46 when bedtime finally struck!

Mimi said...

I'm so glad your hard drive is alive!

I agree, knowing root words and contexts is huge in my ability to figure out what a word means. I had a grand time with that site as well.

scrapper al said...

Thanks for posting about freerice.com. I've been sharing it with my friends and coworkers.

Anonymous said...

So glad your data was recovered.

Your post reminded me of a short story I recently read by Margaret Atwood. The characters make up faux definitions of words, that resemble other words. For example, "Paranoid" A wide-angle camera for taking snapshots of maniacs. I didn't really think it was a good story, but I liked their fun definitions.