now, i am a girl inordinately desirous of taking a survey. i like to fill out forms. when tax season comes around? i am the one my siblings look to. in high school? i would spend those extra minutes making sure the bubble was completely filled in. it’s like? i have OCD or something. so when i heard from everyone’s favorite local college’s pulmonary studies department (that would be breathing functions at the ohio state university for the rest of you) emailing me to say, hey we’ve got some studies starting up are you interested, i said, heck yes. whilst reading the little information/consent forms, i came across the following: “You may get tired or bored when we are asking you questions or you are completing questionnaires. You do not have to answer any question you do not want to answer.” wow. now that must be some seriously boring forms for them to put it in the consent agreement. i can’t wait. (^_^) the other study’s info sheet listed “discovery of undiscovered conditions” under potential side effects of the study, so i guess i’m eager for that one to start, too. (^^;) speaking of beginnings, class starts tomorrow, bright and early at (read: at the unGODly hour of) 8.30 am. anthropology 597, the molecular revolution. i’m already working on a sci-fi story. for scriptfrenzy. what am i, crazy!? i completely FAILed at march madness, i’ve got about fifty-hundred projects half-done, and i have the nastiest class time possible, twice a week, for the next nine weeks. yes, crazy i think is the most appropriate word for me. in other news, i have found my reward for this quarter. see, every quarter, i buy myself a big time present as a reward for successfully refusing to skip class and getting a grade that doesn’t suck horribly. my first quarter it was a phone, the next quarter it was a laptop, this past quarter… was actually another phone (but this one way cooler!). this time, it will be an mp3 player. not that my current zen touch 40 GB is bad, it’s really not. i’ve had it for about four of five years now, and it still basically works. … yeah. the battery life is pretty much suck at this point, and it randomly restarts if it doesn’t like the temperature of the air, the way i’m walking, or the particular speed of the planet’s rotation at that very moment. i’m thinking of getting either a Cowon D2+, which has absolutely stunning battery life (50~52 hours) and plays ogg and flac files, or a zen x-fi. now, they both have 16 and 32 gb models, the prices really aren’t that different, and they both have SDHC capablities. the zen doesn’t integrate the card into the rest of the player, which is both lame and lame, but the cowon apparently has a 8000 file limit (4k for internal memory and 4k for memory card) effectively making the 32 gb model pointless and seriously crippling its desirability for someone (such as myself) with an mp3 library of 24k+ files. which is a shame, coz that battery life makes me wanna cry with Happy. i use my mp3 play a lot. i mean a LOT. anything even close to a 52 hour battery life could make me a terribly happy gal. and upon further inspection, i’ve only got 6725 tracks over ~35 gbs on my zen right now, so a 32 gb player with an SD slot would be kind of overkill i guess anyway. too bad that doesn’t mean that i don’t want it. (^_^) you know they sell 32 gb SDHC cards now? 64 gb mp3 player? oh hai~ anyhow, in closing, i shall leave you with some juicy potential storylines from the ScriptFrenzy plot machine: Lost in the Africa wing of the Science Museum a ticklish polar bear ingests a pheromone that attracts weasels. Halfway through the big to-do list a group of retired superheroes fights a saint in a dark alley. In a remote jungle in Brazil a seriously lost Bedouin tribe travels back in time to kill Hitler. ftw. .