Being Amber Rhea

swan swan hummingbird
hurrah we are all free now

Tomorrow is my midterm. I’m kind of nervous… I have all this Java swimming in my head and I really just want to get it over with. But I think it should be okay.

So anyway, now I am feeling torn. Ken sent me an email saying I should submit my resume to Connected Technologies, a local company, because they need a “Mac expert.” The head of the company is also his fiance’s boss, or some inter-connected thing like that. I don’t know. This is what I wrote back to Ken (no font face this time!) :

“Of course, I would *love* to have a job as a resident “Mac expert.” ;-) This is very tempting and now I feel torn. Because I’ll be starting grad school in the fall and it’ll take up most of my time. But I almost feel I have an *obligation* to provide quality Mac service where needed! What do you think I should do?”

Of course, the rational side of me (which thankfully is usually the more dominant side) knows that once I finish grad school and have a master’s degree, there will be even *more* opportunities, but… whenever I see an ideal-looking Mac job open up, I just feel like I need to jump on it, because 1) it’s what I want to *do* with my life career-wise and 2) Mac jobs don’t come around as often as your dime-a-dozen peecee support jobs. Argh!!

Speaking of Mac stuff… today at work a guy saw my Apple watch and commented on it, and we got to talking… he works in the UGA math dept. and has a new iMac at work and another Mac at home. We had a good “yay Apple” type of conversation. Then later a couple was buying The MacOS X Bible and I struck up small talk with them, as well.

Three little kittens have started coming around our back patio area! They were out there tonight when we got back from the grocery store and they were so adorable! Chris put out some milk for them and we watched them at a distance. Cute little kitties!! Ryan and Lindsay had said that they might get a cat (or more than one) for their new apartment, so maybe they could adopt one or more of these kittens. If not, I’m going to take them to the Humane Society, because I don’t want them to get hurt and/or pregnant or impregnate other cats. (They’re still too little for that right now, though.) I wish we could take them in, but we’re not allowed to have pets here.

You know what? Some people just should not have kids. I see it more and more working at Borders. People just being real assholes to their kids. And they wonder why their kids act like brats – well, where do they get it from? I really want to smack some people around. Like today. This woman was just being so hard-edged talking to her two little boys who were, admittedly, acting up and fussing and stuff, but being CALM and talking to them like PEOPLE would solve the problem a lot better (well, she never solved the problem at ALL, so…) and a lot faster and prevent it from reoccurring. But the worst is with babies. When I see parents whose baby is crying, and they’re doing nothing, I just… well, I can hardly stand it. I want to go up to them and say, “You do not deserve to be a parent.” And take the baby to live somewhere where people really LOVE and CARE for him. The worst was this one time at Target… I could hear a baby crying somewhere in the store, and you know how you can tell if it’s a *little* baby crying, because their cries sound different from those of babies who are more than a few months old. Well, this was a very fussy little baby, and it kept getting louder and louder until I saw this woman round the corner pushing a shopping cart and the baby was in his carrier on the cart, and just CRYING. I mean, SCREAMING. His poor little face was all red and he was so upset!! And she was just walking along, pushing the cart and browsing like nothing was going on. I wanted to punch her in the face. Then I was checking out and she was in the check-out lane next to me, and the poor little baby was STILL crying, and she was STILL doing nothing… I said, “Aw, poor baby!” but I don’t think she heard me… I was SO close to saying something like, “Hey, are you going to pick up your baby or what??” By that point it was upsetting me so much that when I was done checking out I got out of there as fast as I could. But when I was almost to my car in the middle of the parking lot, suddenly I heard the baby *again* – all the way at the front of the store, they were coming out and the baby was STILL crying and the stupid mother was doing NOTHING!!! :-(  What is wrong with some people??

I didn’t mean for that to end up being such a tirade, but can you blame me? Anyway, I need to get some sleep so I’ll be prepared for the midterm tomorrow morning.

I’ve decided I need to learn more about cascading style sheets. Although my web pages pass the W3C validator, iCab says “you should’t use the font tag or the center tag since HTML 4.” After further reading about the font tag I have decided to eliminate it whenever possible, using the big and small tags, and h1-h6 tags instead. But why not center? That’s what I don’t get. And there have been a few times when I haven’t found a good workaround for font. I could just write it off and say iCab is too damn picky (which, truth be told, I actually think it is) but I want iCab to SMILE!

Anyway apparently CSS are (is?) the Next Big Thing. Or so say some.

Also need to put a field in the SQL database so my weblog will record the time of entries as well as the date. Chalk it up to one more thing I need to learn. Oy!

Things are slow as my iBook indexes itself. I just finished reading Scott Kelby’s Macintosh… The Naked Truth and it was an interesting and entertaining read that I mostly agreed with. There were some minor points that I do think are a bit off, or just plain weird, like his claim that all Mac fanatics love Star Trek. Maybe *he* just loves Star Trek and wants to make himself feel better. I dunno. But I certainly do not care for Star Trek.

I’m eating grapes and I was very dismayed to find that about half of them are moldy. These grapes are relatively new. Damn I hate to see fruit go to waste. I am a Vitamin C junkie.

Today was an enjoyable day off from work. Chris and I slept til noon. Then we went to the mall and Chris got some much-needed new clothes. I got a few things too. Later in the afternoon he helped me work on my latest programming project (which is due July 8th). But what I really need to do is make sure I’m prepared for the midterm Monday. I’ll have to study more tomorrow night.

Then we went out to dinner with Lindsay and Ryan at The Grill. That was enjoyable. Ryan really wants to get a job at Borders. I’ve put in a good word for him, but that’s all I can do… I think they should hire him, he’s a pretty cool guy.

Chris is getting his computer prepared to install Red Hat. He also wants to have Windows 2000 on another partition. So he’s installing Windows 98 on the ‘first partition’ (PCs differentiate, I guess) over which he will install Windows 2000, then Linux on the other partition. It all sounds like a big mess to me and an unnecessary hassle. I told him what he should do is get a G4 and parition the drive to have OS 9, OS X, and Red Hat (or whatever distro of his choosing) on it. He was not aware that there’s a PowerPC build for Red Hat. He has been toying with the idea of getting rid of his peecee and getting a Mac – which I think would be awesome. Then we would be a totally Windows-free household. But of course, new G4s are expensive. I told him he could get one like mine for around $700-ish, seeing as how I sold mine for $750. He’s still thinking about it. He can make whatever decision he thinks is best, but of course I hope he chooses to get a Mac. ;-)

I have been saving the contents of my weblog in an ever-increasingly large Appleworks file… it’s now up to 152k (and 49 pages). Damn.

I remember back in early 1995 (aka 9th grade) when I got my first computer, I kept my journal on it in Simpletext, and Simpletext has a max file size… I don’t know what it is in kilobytes, but it always worked out to be about 10 printed pages. I’d be in the middle of typing a sentence and I’d get an error message that said “The document is too large to hold any more data” or something. I ended up having about nine or ten full Simpletext documents (all of which I printed out and stored in a huge binder – which I think is still in a closet in Augusta. I need to get that the next time I go there.) Ah, my faithful old Performa 635CD… served me unfailingly for four years. Never with more than 8 megs of RAM and a 250MB hard drive. And I never felt choked or stifled. I have sentimental feelings for that computer and now I kind of feel bad about selling it a couple years ago.

I need to try to sleep because I work the good ol’ 8-4 shift tomorrow. But I’m not tired. That’s what I get for sleeping til noon. Argh. My perpetually abnormal schedule.

I succeeded in getting July 4th and 5th off from work… of course, the 4th is a holiday for the university, and Chris should be able to get the 5th off easily… so we’re going to take a little trip up to Asheville, NC! Yay! Should be fun. I think we’re going to stay in a bed and breakfast, and we might go to the Biltmore House and I don’t know what else. It should be a good time… I’m excited. :-)

So this morning I was a little slow getting started… I had to go to lab to show the stupid TA my third lab assignment for this week, and technically the lab for which I am registered meets 9:15-11:30; but there are two more labs after that, so I figured it wouldn’t be a big deal. I ended up getting to Boyd (the building) at around 11:45. I went into the lab but my TA wasn’t there; the other TA was. Figured she could check it off too. But when I asked her about it, she said she didn’t have the list of people’s names for his lab. Oh well. I decided I wasn’t going to spend all afternoon chasing him around the building just to show him that I can convert a String to an integer; missing one lab assignment won’t make me fail the class.

But since I was there, I figured I’d go ahead and talk to her about the whole issue with my program (see June 26th’s entry). She looked in her bag and pulled out the folder with my print-out and disk in it, and as I was saying how I have the professional version and that’s probably why it wouldn’t work on the lab computers, she said, “Your disk had a bad format.” “Huh?” I asked. She said, “I put in the disk and it said it was not formatted.” Then, to prove it, she put my disk in the computer and sure enough, after making a lot of noise for a few seconds, a message came up saying “Disk in drive A is not formatted”, or something like that. “Oh for godsake,” I thought to myself, but I said, “Oh… well, I guess that’s because I saved it from my Mac, and apparently that computer doesn’t want to read the Mac disk.” It is the year 2002, and a brand new Dell f*cking computer won’t read a disk that was formatted on a Mac. The mind boggles. Macs have been able to read PC-formatted disks since the 80s… but I figured there was no point in bringing that up.

Fortunately I had my iBook with me, so I said, “Well, I have it right here on my computer, unchanged, if you want to see it.” She said okay, so I started up the computer and opened the Codewarrior project and went to run it, but she said, “No… from the disk” and pushed the floppy at me. “Oh… I don’t have my floppy drive with me,” I said, as she visually examined the outside of the iBook and looked confused. I continued, “But it’s right here and I haven’t touched it since I turned it in… I understand that you have no reason to believe me on that, but…” But she said okay. So I ran it, and she looked at the code and compared it with the code on my print-out (I guess to verify that I hadn’t changed anything) and she said, “Okay, you get 100%.”

I was thinking, “Damn straight I get 100%.” All that brouhaha and unnecessary difficulty, just to show that I can do simple arithmetic. Should be fun doing the same thing with the second program, since apparently my TA will be the one grading it. He’s not nearly as nice as Ms. Wang was.

[sigh]… the never-ending saga of being a Mac user in a Windoze world. Reminds me of something an acquaintance said once, upon discovering that some software he needed was for Windows only… “Now I know what it feels like to be black.”

Also in lab, when I first got there, this guy sitting a couple seats away was looking at me, so I said hi, and he said, “I noticed in class that you have an Apple computer…” I pulled my iBook out of my bag and said, “Yep, here it is.” He asked how much I’d paid for it. I told him I’d gotten it second-hand for $1000. He raised his eyebrows in surprise. I told him that it was an extra-sweet deal because it had more RAM and more software than the configuration Apple sells (well, sold, now) new for $1199. “When was that manufactured… 2000?” he asked. I replied, “No, this particular one is just over a year old, and they were selling this model new up until a few months ago.” A look of surprise again… “Hm, $1000 for a Mac, that’s not bad.” Next he asked, “So, are you running OS X?” “Well, I have it installed, but I don’t use it that often… I don’t like it all that much,” I said. This time he looked very surprised and with the slightest tone of incredulity in his voice, he asked, “Really? Why not? Do you not like UNIX?” I answered, “I like UNIX okay, but I’ve been a Mac user my whole life, and, well, I’m just not all that impressed with OS X.” “Oh,” he said quickly.

Don’t get me wrong, he was a nice guy, and I’m not trying to make any judgements about his character or anything. Really I found the whole thing very amusing and entertaining. Why am I (and my iBook) such a novelty?! ROFL!!

Well, it’s about to storm, so I’d better stop for now… I thought about going to Target but I’ll probably just stay here and study more ProgramLive until I have to go to work at 5:00. The midterm exam is Monday.

Tonight at work, after we’d closed, Emily and some other people were talking about going out to a bar after work… Emily asked me if I wanted to come, and I said, “No thanks, I have class tomorrow morning.” Then later when we were leaving and we were all walking through the parking lot, Emily said, “So Amber, you coming out drinking?” Again I said no, that I couldn’t because I had class. She said, “Oh come on, I drank my way through college!” I was just like, “Sorry… maybe next time…” Of course, I didn’t want to go out drinking with them, seeing as how I don’t drink – but it wasn’t that I didn’t want to go out drinking with them, it was that I didn’t want to go out drinking with them. It made me feel good that they’d invited me along and I didn’t want Emily or anyone else to think that I didn’t want to hang out with them or that I thought I was too good or anything like that. It kind of put me in an awkward spot. What is it with all this drinking, anyway? Why do they have to go to a bar after work – why can’t they just go to IHOP?!

Do you like the little Apple house logo I put in the frame to the left? <----- Does it blend well or does it just look stupid? Let me know.

I did not have a very good morning. After lecture, I went to lab, intending to just show him this week’s three labs (I’d done them already) and get them checked off and leave. Well, as soon as everyone enters the room, he (the stupid TA) says, “I have your projects” meaning program #1 was graded. I was excited to see what I got on it, and I went up with everyone else and was looking for mine, but I didn’t see it. When the stupid TA saw me, he said, “Are you Amber Rhea?” (and he mispronounced my last name) “Yes,” I replied. He said, “Okay, you need to go see Ms. Wang [the other TA] during her office hours Monday; your program wouldn’t run.” WHAT?? I was very taken aback – and aside from being shocked, because my program DID work just fine, I was thinking, “God, thanks for embarassing me in front of the entire class!” Because he just said that while everyone else was up there getting their projects, so they all heard. I felt humiliated! I asked him, “Well, do you know WHY it wouldn’t run? Were there some files missing or something?” And he was just like, “I don’t know, Ms. Wang graded them, go see her and she’ll regrade it.” Then he walked off. Bastard!!

Well, I come to find out that the reason my program wouldn’t run is that I have the professional version of CodeWarrior, whereas the computers in the lab (where they test everything [this is the lab I used to work in, incidentally]) have the “learning edition”. :P I found this out from Nathan, whom I visited immediately after leaving lab, because I wanted to bitch to someone. He said that the professional edition and the learning edition make the structure of their .mcp files totally different… which seems incredibly stupid to me, since regardless of the edition, it’s the SAME PROGRAM!! It’s all CodeWarrior!! I can save a file with the full version of Photoshop and open it with Photoshop Elements because they’re both Photoshop! Jesus Christ, what is so difficult about that? So anyway… looks like I’m going to have to go see this Ms. Wang Monday afternoon at 3:30, and take the files from my program and build a new CodeWarrior project out of them on the lab computers, to prove that the thing will run… as if they couldn’t figure it out by just looking at the files; I mean it wasn’t exactly the most complicated program in the world – it was basically seeing if you could add and subtract. And I guess I’m going to have to do the same thing with the second program too, since it was due today and I turned it in before knowing about this stupidity.

So now, apparently, every time I want to turn a program in, I’m going to have to come to the lab and re-build the project with that version of CodeWarrior. :P Yes, that makes a lot of sense.

And also, as I was waiting for the stupid TA to check off my labs, I was getting one of them ready on my computer (two were written and one was a programming assignment, and I had my iBook with me so I was just going to show it to him on there) and for some reason it WOULDN’T RUN. It gave me some weird error. It’s probably nothing big and I probably could have figured it out if I’d sat down for a few minutes and looked at it, but at that point I was in such a bad mood that I just got the two written labs checked off and left. Guess I’ll have to go Friday morning and show him the third one.

That’s my ranting for now. Now I’m going to clean up the computer room a little bit. Earlier I took all the keys off my iBook and cleaned out underneath; it was pretty gross. There were all these hairs and things stuck in the key mechanisms. I cleaned it out as best as I could, but I think there were some things I just couldn’t get. I wiped the whole area down with Windex and now it’s drying on the dining room table, with the keys lined up neatly in order beside it.

Ken has a quote from REM’s “Can’t Get There From Here” on his weblog. Yay! Someone else who enjoys arcane REM lyric references!

Wow, it feels so cool to be typing in MY OWN WEBLOG. :-) Yes, I am easily amused. Oh, that reminds me (don’t ask why), I saw this thing in a book at work last night… it said, “Don’t sweat the petty things, and don’t pet the sweaty things.” ROFL!! Words to live by (by which to live).

Okay, I feel kind of crazy… lately I feel perpetually sleep-deprived, because I work until midnight a couple nights a week and then have class at 9:15 – but it’s not even that, I don’t think, because that’s still about 7 hours of sleep, but something about being in that classroom just makes me want to nod off. It’s dark, chilly, and the seats are comfortable. And I have to try to pretend like I’m *not* nodding off, because I sit in the front row and she stares at me all the time. Sometimes I lose track of what she’s saying because I’m trying so hard to keep my eyes open! (Fortunately I am still keeping up with the work and concepts of the class, though. Our second program is due tomorrow.) This morning I had to leave in the middle (when she gave us a break) and come home and take a nap. [sigh]… I just wish I could have some semblance of a normal schedule! Maybe in the fall things will straighten up a little bit. We shall see. Until then, I’ll just try to do my best and keep up and keep things in perspective, and take care of myself.

Oh, I heard a rumor from a fellow soon-to-be MIT student that Dr. Seila, the director of the program, had resigned! Something about problems with budget funding, and him already being pissed off because his personal secretary was let go. I don’t know if it’s true or not. I asked one of last year’s graduates with whom I have been exchanging email, and who is currently on some kind of board for the program, and she didn’t know anything about it. Well, whatever happens, I just hope the program is still in *existence* for us in the fall!

The new weblog is up! Woohoo! Fully functional and free-standing (dig the alliteration). Only two small things left to take care of – first, gotta order the months in the archive, because right now it goes June, April, May… second, I want the newest entry to appear at the top of the page instead of vice versa. I’ll (with Chris’s help) get to that tomorrow. It’s past my bedtime now, but I just wanted to write my first entry in my new weblog! (I copied all the old entries over from Blogger.) I’m exhausted after a looooong day – more tomorrow! :-)

Tomorrow is my last day at the Georgia Center, and Chris’s first day. We’re both going in at 1:00 and I’m going to “train him.” I find that amusing. Anyway, I’m glad I won’t have to worry about that job anymore. Even though I have been feeling somewhat uncertain about Borders… I mean, I like all the people I work with, they’re all really cool, and I can usually even stand the large proportion of rude customers – I guess it’s just that it takes up so much *time* when I feel I need to be working on stuff for class. I know that might sound kind of ridiculous, since I’m taking only one class (well, two if you count Online@UGA) and I had a job almost every semester throughout undergrad, when I was taking three, four, or five classes a semester. But I’ve never had a class like 1301 – it’s not that it’s hard, it’s just that it’s a lot of work and takes a lot of time. I enjoy it, but it’s the kind of thing I have to devote a fair amount of time to. Also, prior to Borders, every job I had while in college was the kind where I had time to do homework and study. In fact, they were all on campus. The Faculty Records Office at NYU, then ResNet, then Copy Services here at UGA, then the CS lab, and finally the Georgia Center. (Yeah I worked at Waldenbooks in the summer of ‘99, but I wasn’t taking classes that summer.) So the 29 hours a week I work at Borders really does take a substantial chunk out of my available schoolwork time. I found myself wondering if I did the right thing by quitting the Georgia Center and starting at Borders. Should I have stayed at the Georgia Center through the end of the summer? That way I could have used my time there to do work. But I know that couldn’t have happened, because I didnt know what my class would be like, and if I *hadn’t* started working at Borders all I would have been doing would be sitting around complaining about how I should be working at Borders. Plus, sitting in that closet for several hours a day was really starting to get to me. It made it hard to concentrate, so I don’t know how productive I would have been.

Sometimes I find myself really not wanting to go to work at Borders… and like I said, it’s not that I don’t *like* it there, it’s just that I feel like I have almost no free time. Does that make sense? I’m thinking of asking for Friday nights off – then I would be working 22 hours a week instead (which is closer to what I originally told James – that I could work “around 20 hours” a week). I’ll see how it goes next week, without my Georgia Center job, and then I’ll decide. But I’m really leaning toward doing that. I can’t seem to get myself on any sort of regular schedule – for example, Sundays I always end up taking a nap after work (I work 8:00-4:00) so then I stay up late and don’t get as much sleep as I probably need for Monday, and the cycle perpetuates itself.

I keep reminding myself that I’ll only be working at Borders til mid-August, when fall semester starts. Then I’ll have my assistantship and also hopefully be working in the Mac lab at the College of Family and Consumer Sciences.

Anyway, I do like working Sundays at Borders, because it generally doesn’t start to get busy until around 1:00 or 2:00, and I work with Jimmy, Jacob, and Emily who are all really cool. Especially Jimmy, he cracks me up. He’s one of the supervisors. This morning we were talking about rude customers and he said, “If you ever feel that you need to say something to a customer, do it while I’m here, because I will totally back you up.” Hell yes!

Some customers… goddamn. What is it with people? First of all, a general complaint – I am amazed by the amount of people who, when I say “hello” to them at the register, say NOTHING back! Who do these people think they are? Where do they come from? It seems to me to be a natural thing – someone says hello to you, you say hello back. As simple as that. So if they don’t say anything back to me, I stop being polite to them. Why should I bend over backward for their sorry ass?

I was not aware that rednecks listen to Kenny G, but apparently they do, because two of them bought Kenny G CDs today.

In the afternoon, Wendy opened this big box of beachballs that we had to blow up. There were like ten of them. Apparently there’s some new display going up with beachballs hanging from the ceiling, or something. So five or six of us were standing around blowing up these beachballs and getting light-headed… it was really the type of thing that should have been captured on film.

Well, I’ve been working on tweaking/modifying Chris’s php weblog code… this is my first foray into the world of php, and when I’m done, I’ll have my own self-sufficient weblog – no more Blogger! So I’m off to work on that some more…