Is anyone else as pumped as I am for Season 3 of Deadliest Catch, which starts Tuesday? I’m not usually one to rave about TV shows that aren’t on C-SPAN 2 but I’ll rave about this one. I got hooked (sigh) last year in D.C., and I’ve got to say, it really does something that pretty much all other reality TV shows fail at: illuminating part of our world. The first season of Survivor was entertaining enough, but I tuned out somewhere in the middle of Survivor: Africa and never looked back. I think I’ve seen about 10 episodes total of Real World and two episodes of Fear Factor.

With the possible exception of Project Runway, it’s all crap compared to Deadliest Catch. Especially if, like me, you love your seafood. I never realized how hardcore that industry is when I was eating King Crab legs until I found Deadliest Catch. It’s worth a watch if you haven’t seen it to get a glimpse at the crabbing industry. We all know how bad much of the meatpacking industry is but a lot of us (myself included) turn our backs on that and keep eating anyway. Crabbing doesn’t seem to be nearly as heinous, at least based on what you see on Deadliest Catch, and it gives you a new appreciation for what goes on to get those crabs onto your plate. No, I’m not shilling for Discovery Channel, either. It’s on at 9 p.m. Tuesday for the next 12 weeks.

In the mean time, Discovery Channel has some videos of parts of last season and the upcoming season on their Web site.

Well, I’m in Palo Alto for Spring Break. Everything seems so…big down here. The Seattle metro area is relatively small when compared with the Bay Area. And for the record, Bay Area traffic is worse.

I survived finals okay. Funny how things seem to get a little crazy during the last week of classes and finals week. One more quarter, and then I’m done for the year. I will probably be in Serbia this summer, doing a language program. In order to do my MA thesis research, I need to get beyond sentences like “Ovo je prozor” (that is the window). I’ve purchased three or four books about travelling in Europe. I think I’m more excited about the travel than I am the language program.

I just received word today that I’ve been accepted into the cheaper language program at Arizona State. This program unfortunately starts during my finals week, meaning that I’ll have to miss a few days. I also received word that there are scholarships available for the practicum portion of the program, which will take place in Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina. I’m still waiting to hear whether or not I’ve been accepted to the program in Serbia — but I expect I will be.

Now comes the hard part: making a decision. I could stay in the US, do the program here, and only pay the cost of housing and meals for the summer, or I could go to Serbia. The cost of living in Serbia is so much cheaper than in the US that I could probably get by with a few thousand. And then I could travel. Granted, I’d probably have to take out more student loans to do either program. I’m already carrying a considerable amount of student loan debt, so I don’t really want to do that. I just keep telling myself that education is a good investment.

Sigh. What’s going to happen when we, the Debt Generation, turn 30? Am I going to regret taking on more loans to finish my degrees?

Wednesday was a pretty scary day for my 12″ G4 Powerbook. It would have been a perfectly benign day spent sitting on my coffee table asleep had a wayward glass of water not splashed across it, courtesy of my girlfriend, while I was at work. She wiped everything up and thought everything looked fine, since the computer was closed and water seemingly only got on the top shell.

But lo, I returned home to find my compy *off* instead of asleep. After booting up, it refused to mount my flash drive on the desktop, and then froze up a minute later while loading a Web page. Red flags popped up all over. This was not good.

Being the decently savvy laptop user I am, I suspected there was water inside somewhere and unplugged the power and ripped out the battery. And there it was, at least a few drops of water on top of the battery and inside the battery compartment (If you’re not familiar with PB anatomy, click through to here for great step-by-step guides to disassembling them). I proceeded with pulling out the extra ram (there was more water on the top of the plastic slot enclosure) and fully removing the keyboard (thankfully, no visible water there). I stopped short of pulling off the top case, since that requires taking out about 23 Torx, hex and phillips screws and the last time I did it, I completely fried my old Powerbook somehow (The hard drive failed, but whatever. And yes, I was wearing a grounding strap that time).

I scared myself silly Googling for water and laptops, and decided to let everything sit undisturbed and dry out until Saturday morning. I felt like Jack Bauer with the adrenaline and the air of uncertainty and the gun to my head as I reassembled everything yesterday. It was a tense few moments as the optical drive briefly spun up…and the screen stayed dark for an unusually long time before the normal grey Apple logo popped up. I did a quick-and-dirty backup right way (photos and music, mainly), but so far everything is functioning normally. I kept the battery out for a while, fearing that its own circuitry had failed, but it is now working fine…cross your fingers.

So to anyone cruising around here after a similarly harrowing experience with liquids and Powerbooks, keep a little hope. Then again, only water was spilled on mine (I hear soda and juice is murder) and it was a pretty small quantity at that. The general consensus out there is that liquid on the logic board in any amount is instant death, and a new one will run you about $500 plus labor if you have someone do the work for you. On the plus side, the design of the aluminum Powerbooks makes it rather difficult to get water on the LB, unless it enters through the rear air vents or drains through the keyboard. Oh, I haven’t tested the optical drive yet, so who knows how that faired.