I took this mental health test a while back, but had no blog to post the results on, but now I do. The major findings of this test were symptoms of Major Depressive Disorder and Borderline Personality Disorder. Well woop-di-doo, whatever, I thought, but then I decided to look up what Borderline Personality Disorder meant exactly (definitions provided by the same site) and it was kinda scary actually. Like those “draw a picture and I can tell your personality” things, where they get it mostly wrong, but one thread comes through clearly, except this one was quite good.

Here are the best bits:

People with BPD often have highly unstable patterns of social relationships. While they can develop intense but stormy attachments, their attitudes towards family, friends, and loved ones may suddenly shift from idealization (great admiration and love) to devaluation (intense anger and dislike). Thus, they may form an immediate attachment and idealize the other person, but when a slight separation or conflict occurs, they switch unexpectedly to the other extreme and angrily accuse the other person of not caring for them at all.

Even with family members, individuals with BPD are highly sensitive to rejection, reacting with anger and distress to such mild separations as a vacation, a business trip, or a sudden change in plans. These fears of abandonment seem to be related to difficulties feeling emotionally connected to important persons when they are physically absent, leaving the individual with BPD feeling lost and perhaps worthless. Suicide threats and attempts may occur along with anger at perceived abandonment and disappointments.

Basically, that’s me in a nutshell for that kind of thing. I can feel a friend is worth so much to me, then a little tiny thing happens, and it’s like the feeling drains and needs constant reassurance, recapacitance, to maintain the feeling, otherwise I switch down to being worthless in their eyes, and disliking them. And rejection and abandonment are my biggest fears, and of course, the ones that reoccur seemingly regularly.

I also feel as if I am insanely jealous… by the definition I learned in my Philosophy of Love class. Jealously isn’t envy, if I’m jealous of someone, it’s not that I want to be them or have what they have, it’s that I’m fearful that I’ll lose them, that they will drop out of my life, or not serve the function in my life that is most desired by me. But how can I fear losing someone, if they were never mine in the first place?

Went out for new years, just Curtis, Alicia and I. It was pretty fun, ate at a fancy restaurant, hung out, got free beer, endured the dark city, and learned to play a game I thought I already knew, but turns out I was hopeless at.
New Years Resolution: Stop Trying. (any context is fine)

Going back to school in a day or two, hardly looking forward to it. Been working on this damned animation for my brother, just gets worse and worse, and my computer can’t handle a lot of it, piffle.

Anyway, not much to say this time, perhaps next.

If anyone actually visits this site, they might notice that I’ve gotten rid of the long standing frames. Now the menu is a div element and sits to the left and CSS tries to mimic the effect of the frame. I’ve tested this in NS 7 and IE 6, but haven’t had my own comp on the net for the holiday so I’ll have to make sure Firefox doesn’t barf on it.

As for what I’ve been doing the past few days: Watching endless Red Dwarf episodes, got seasons 1-4 for xmas, now on to M*A*S*H season 7. And I’ve been working on yet another animation for my brother, for DVD’s he’s trying to make. He wanted a scene with an infinite number of lockers, that the viewpoint zooms through, basically a rip off of the Matrix effect when they are in the pre-area and ask for guns, and the infini-racks appear. Doing that with carefully constructed lockers is near impossible with 3d studio, as to make it converge to the horizon, you need a lot of them, and the system just bogs down. So for the zooming part, just using long strips with locker texture on them… the result is…….. less than sucessful, but tweaking remains to be done.

Poor computer wasn’t meant for such abuse. I need more memory.

So I made the mistake in trying to upgrade my computer yesterday, yes, should have learned, but I never do.

I went out and bought a DVD writer, an LG 16X Super Multi DVD/CD Rewriter (why do they need the super, ugh), and put it in the computer… restart….. windows has detected signigicant change in your computer hardware and must reauthenticate within 3 days. (changing one component is significant?)

So I was going to phone in the code like I did when I first bought the thing, except, where the code was supposed to be, nothing…. the screen had all the info on it, but it seems it forgot to display the code I needed to phone in. Contacting customer support helped nothing, as they hadn’t seen this problem before, and upper support claimed the computer, given it’s serial number, was supposed to be running 64bit windows which was impossible and what the hell are Staples, Proteva and Synergio respectively. That got us nowhere.

Finally, rebooting the computer seemed to fix it. I’m sick of that, no reason for it to fail, but it did…. fine, phoned in the code, authenticated windows again, and vowed to pirate ever after.

Not that any of this helped though, the DVD writer doesn’t quite work. I’ve got that drive, and also a simple DVD ROM drive not 2 years old in it, but when trying to copy a DVD disc to disc (even a DVD I had just burned myself with some test files on it) it would immediately crap out saying it couldn’t be done, but of course, gave no reason. This is in Nero Express, came with the drive.

Couldn’t even make an image from a DVD that sits in the old drive, had to move it to the writer drive to even save an image to the hard drive…. so I took some DVD my father wanted copied, a memorial movie about a company he was involved with, it had been burned too, so I figured there shouldn’t be any problem. After burning 2 copies of it via the image-to-harddisk method, here are the results.

My Computer’s DVD software:
Original Disc – Freezes and crashes DVD software when accessing some menus
Burned Disc – same thing in the same places

My parents’ new standalone DVD player:
Original Disc – Plays fine
Burned Disc – Says the disc is incompatible with the player, even though the manual says it can play virtually every format, including and explicitly the one I used.

My brother’s old standalone DVD player:
Original Disc – Plays fine
Burned Disc – plays for a while, craps out in some places, turning the player off.

That’s some consistency. I should have stopped when I was ahead (merely wanting a DVD writer, rather than having one, and wanting to tear my hair out)

At least writing simple files to the damn thing seems to work, so I can finally shift some crap off my computer, gig’s and gig’s of star trek. god I’m lame.

So another xmas come and gone. Didn’t really have any xmas atmosphere here, as my parents are renovating the livingroom and kitchen, so everything is a mess. We only have a little fibre-optic tree going, alas.

My main gift was from my brother, a UPS, which is something I’ve wanted for a while now. It lists itself as 50 minutes, but of course, it’s a lie, or rather, for a very specific computer setup that makes the thing look good. with my computer, it estimates 6 minutes… well, no bother, what I really wanted it for were the little power flicks I get at the place I’m living at now. Then after that, it’s handy to have 6 minutes of power, and then the usb connector to the thing can handle saving whatever is open and shutting the comp down, which is nice of it, so I’m pleased.

Something I didn’t get at all, in any form, was a DVD burner, but I expected only the UPS or the burner, not both, and the UPS is easier to shop for. So my next move is to buy a burner, not sure if I should get an internal or external. All four IDE connections are taken, but I’d probably remove the CD writer and put the DVD writer in there, as any one I get would be able to burn CD’s as well. But I need one desperately, my drives (two 120 gig’ers) are nearly full, only a couple gig left on both, damned downloading episodes, argle.

Anyway, merry xmas, and a happy new year… I seriously wonder if I’ll be doing anything on new year, no plans have been made thus far, so I might spend another one alone. It’s not great, but hardly terrible.

Thought I’d post a picture of the new family cat, just to put some content in this thing, and also, he’s a fairly cute cat.

I suggest that everyone try to play this game, or at least see it played. It is simply one of the most amusing and addictive puzzle games I’ve played, and the soundtrack is perfectly enjoyable on it’s own.

See the crazy opening movie here

Oh, and merry xmas all.

All of a sudden, things started to work again. Accouding to php’s info, the version is still the same, but things work, so I assume that Zend was upgraded, I’m surprised, the office is supposed to be closed.

Anyway, my other entries will return in a bit, I’m off to a family get-together right now.

Hmm, some of my marks have appeared already, including the dreaded Actsci 231 mark. If I had failed that course, it would have totally derailed university, and I would have had to take another term to make it up, which would have sucked incredibly. But, it seems, against all likelyhood, that I passed it, and it’s not even my worst mark ever either.

It’s my second worst