There is a strange trend in my house. My brother is a big-time computer gamer, so every two years or so (or even less than that it seems) he gets a whole new computer decked out with the latest high tech junk for online gaming. When that happens somehow I keep getting his old computer and it turns into my new one. We have lots of computers around; my dad just buys parts and builds them himself, so my brother and I both have a laptop and a desktop each, and my parents have two desktops. There are also older ones lying around that aren't in use anymore.
My desktop has been broken for about a year, so I've been living exclusively on my laptop. My bigger hard drive went bad AGAIN (it had already been reformatted once; don't ever buy from Western Digital! My brother also had the same problem with another hard drive from them). Since this was around the same time I got my laptop, I just used it instead and my desktop has been sitting under my desk untouched. Well my brother just got another new computer, so his old one has yet again come to me. The only difference is that my hard drives have been put into it, but all the super-gaming hardware has stayed the same. I have a new, bigger (250 GB) hard drive along with my one of my old ones that works and has for years (good thing because it has all my precious anime and mp3s and programs on it!). That's nice and all, but now comes all the annoying work of installing everything I need onto the new hard drive.
That has to wait because I have to spend all day today doing schoolwork. One of my projects is transcribing a recording we made of a non-native speaker (NNS) of English doing a narration. That is, the NNS and an NS (native speaker) both watched a Charlie Chaplin movie (now you know the source of my newfound love of Charlie Chaplin *g*), then the NS left for the last 20 minutes while the NNS watched the rest of the movie. Then when it was over the NS came back, and the NNS had to tell her what happened in the last 20 minutes in as much detail as possible. We recorded her narration and now I have to transcribe the whole thing (10 1/2 minutes of talking), due on Monday. Doesn't sound too hard, right? HA. The transcription has to include all the pauses, stress, intonation patterns, etc. that accompany speech, so in fact it takes about an hour to transcribe one minute of speech, if you're lucky! And as I've only done two minutes so far, I have about another 8 hours of transcription work ahead of me. Yay. I also have a paper due in two weeks I really need to get started on, but I'll have to worry about that later. Grad school...woo!
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