Never take anything for granted. You never know when you’ll wake up one morning and want to kick yourself in the head for being such a big fat idiot. Never, ever take anything for granted. Live life one day at a time. Appreciate the good; life is too short for anything else.
December 2002
Christmas is over and now it’s almost 2003. I know it’s cliche and I say it every New Year, but, “Wow, I can’t believe it.” This also means that my break is rapidly getting shorter, too. I have to do some database work but I’ve been putting it off (and probably consequently making it into a bigger deal than it really is) because it just feels sacriligeous [sp?] to do schoolwork over break. But such is grad school, I s’pose! In a way it will be nice to get back to school. (I’ll be kicking myself for saying that in a few months!)
Chris and I had good Xmases in Columbus and Augusta. Everything went well. But it’s always nice to be back in Athens!
My spring class schedule (assuming nothing changes between now and then) :
CSCI 6345: Internet Information Systems: Mon 12:20-1:10, Tu/Thu 12:30-1:45
MIST 7590: Project Management: Fri 8:00-11:00 (until Feb. 6th)
CSCI 6390: MIT Project: Mon 3:35-4:25
CSCI 6800: Human-Computer Interaction: Tu/Thu 2:00-3:15, Wed 2:30-3:20
LING 6860: Sociolinguistics: Tu/Thu 3:30-4:45
And I’m teaching at the following times:
Mon 10:10-11:00, Wed 10:10-11:00, Wed 11:15-12:05, Wed 1:25-2:15
(Can you tell I’m bored and restless? I wish I could SLEEP! I hope they give me an antibiotic that knocks me out.)
According to my referrer tracker, someone found my web site by doing a Google search (Google in Thai, no less) for “first semester grad school sucks.” ROFL!!
No, the time stamp is not wrong, it is 5:41 AM. I’ve been up for about two hours because I just could not sleep. I’m sick – sore throat, congestion, all that fun stuff. Tomorrow (well, later today, I guess) I’m planning on going to the Health Center to see if they’ll give me a hardcore antibiotic, because it would really suck to be sick for our anniversary (Monday!!) and Xmas. Saturday we’re leaving for Columbus, and will return Sunday night; then go to Augusta on the 24th.
I hate being sick!!! :-(
In other news, I downloaded iCab for OS X and am immensely pleased with it. (My love for Opera 6 died after it crashed several times – ok, it is just a beta, but I still don’t like crashes.) And guess what? iCab actually smiles at my new site! Oh – if you haven’t looked at my new site design, take a look and drop me a line to let me know what you think. (And I also looked at it with Lynx about an hour ago and it looks fine, so I may take down some of the compatibility mumbo-jumbo on the home page.)
I’ve found out three of my grades – E-Comm, NMI, and Databases – all A’s!! So now I just have to wait to hear on Networking (though I think it’s safe to say I got an A in that) and CS. It would be so cool if I had a 4.0! Hey, I only managed to acheive that for one semester as an undergrad; so I think doing it in grad school is something to be proud of.
I thought I’d already ranted about this in my weblog, but I guess not. So here is my addition to a “Windows vs. Mac OS” thread on the G-Books listserv that some troll started:
“I have to add to this discussion, too. A few weeks ago I was using an Olympus digital camera borrowed from my department at the university. After I was done taking pictures I came back to download them to a computer. Now, the department has IBM Thinkpads and Dell Inspirions. (No Macs! And this is the ‘New Media Institute!’) They have several different digital cameras, and my professor had specifically given me the Olympus because, as he said, ‘This camera tends to work better with those IBMs.’ I had bad feelings about trying this on a PC, but I thought I’d give it a shot, remembering my prof’s words. I got out a Stinkpad – I mean, Thinkpad – and plugged the USB cable from the camera into the computer. Surprise, surprise… Windows ‘new hardware found’ message pops up and asks if I want to install drivers. I knew it was futile but I thought, why not, and did the ’search for drivers’ deal, and of course, it couldn’t find any. I decided to reboot (because we know how Windows looooves those reboots) with the camera still plugged in and this time the computer did not recognize the camera at all. I was getting really annoyed because I was short on time and working toward a fast-approaching deadline. Fortunately, I had my iBook with me. I took it out, plugged in the camera, which immediately showed up as a drive on the desktop, then opened iPhoto and imported the pictures. Simple as that. Took less than a minute. I could’ve spent another 15-30 minutes (at least!) futzing with that IBM trying to get it to work, but hey, I don’t have time for that kind of crap. (I felt like the Switcher commercial about the girl who saved Christmas.) :-)
“And yet there are still plenty of people in my program (Master of Internet Technology) who CONTINUE to scoff at and make fun of Macs, even though they’ve never used one (or if they have, it was at least 10 years ago) AND their computers are constantly breaking! Seriously – there are 27 people in my program and the count is up to about 10 now of how many people’s peecee laptops have had major problems requiring them to be out of commission for days to weeks this semester! Meanwhile, I cruise along with my iBook, getting all my work done and having time to spare.”
Boo yah!
So, I was on CNN! :-) I feel famous. I think I already mentioned that last week CNN came to talk to some students about our NMI projects. They interviewed me, Mary, Clay, and some undergrads. (All in all they ended up spending 7 hours in Athens!) The spot aired at 1:00 Saturday on a show called Next@CNN. (It was also supposed to air 4:00 Sunday but got interrupted by “breaking news” that Al Gore isn’t running for president in 2004. I don’t see why that’s such breaking news.) The accompanying article is here – they mention my name in the article, too! :-) If you have RealPlayer, you can watch the TV spot here: http://128.192.205.55:8080/ramgen/wag/cnnwagz2.rm. Also, Mary’s dad taped it and digitized it – Mary is going to edit it and email it to me, and then I’ll post it in Quicktime format.
I know it might sound silly, but I am still giddy about this – hey, I’ve never been on national TV before!
Aside from that, exams are over with (finally!) and I feel such a sense of relief. I have been enjpying the past two days of no academic obligations. I’ve been working on the xmas gifts I’m making, and redesigning my web site. (Don’t know when the new site will go up.) I’m thinking of writing a guestbook for my site. Now that there’s no school, I actually have time to do this stuff for FUN! Also, I’ll finally have time to work on painting and mosaicing my table upstairs. Yay!
This is pretty funny. (Takes a while to load, but it’s worth it.)
The wind was up to 32mph yesterday morning and the rain was pouring. It was awful. Standing at the bus stop, I felt like I was in a hurricane. I thought I might be blown away, seriously. I was holding onto my umbrella as hard as I could because there was a very good chance it would get blown away. It did get blown inside-out.
Enough talk about the weather. At least all my exams are over with. Yay! And the good news is, I got an A in E-Comm! :-D Now I just have to go to NMI presentations Monday and I’ll be DONE for this semester.
I received the following email from a random person with an arches.uga.edu address:
“Hey–just saw your site and the photo with the arch–gotta say HBTD!!!How do you survive at GA with Macs?They’re all PC geeks here–anyway, enjoyed your site!”
I’m mystified… photo with the arch? I don’t have any photo with the arch! And what does HBTD mean?? If you know, please clue me in!!
One down, two to go.The E-Commerce exam was earlier today. It wasn’t too bad. Then I went to Baxter Street Bookstore to try to sell that damn 100-pound book, and those fools wanted to give me $20 for it! Whatevah! That thing was $100 new (fortunately I found it on half.com for like $60). So that’s where it’s going now – back to half.com. $20 my ass! Ain’t nothin’ but a scam.
We sold the peecee that Chris’s dad had dumped on us (Pentium 75, 16 megs RAM, I don’t know about the HD) to Molly, whose laptop recently died of a mysterious “problem with the motherboard.” She’s going to install Red Hat on it. Sounds good to me. That’s better than sending it to the dumpster. (Though I admit, I have sent a peecee or two to the dumpster in my lifetime. On the other hand, I climb in the dumpster to rescue Macs.)
Chris was cooking hamburgers and spilled fat on the floor and I was slipping around on the fat. Ewww.
I mailed some Xmas cards today. I do like the holiday cheer. I miss Jenny and Niki. :-(
I’m also upset because my iBook is missing a key. A couple weeks ago when I’d popped off the keys to clean underneath, I accidentally broke the mechanism of the F9 key. On the bright side, who uses the F9 key? But it annoys me. Next time I’m in Atlanta I may go to the Apple store and see if they’ll give me a replacement key thingy (I don’t know the correct terminology).
Anyway, guess I better study for my Databases exam. I’ll be glad when that one’s over with.
“Amber is said to be able to draw out negative energy and transform it into positive energy for healing and well being” (from googlism.com)
I’ve got a lot of my/our xmas “shopping” taken care of. I put shopping in quotation marks because 1) I am trying to avoid actually going out to stores as much as possible and 2) a lot of this year’s presents are being made or baked (typo: naked) by moi. I like it better this way. The whole holiday association with money and how-many-presents-can-you-buy-to-show-that-you-love-me has always disgusted me.
I do like going out to stores sometimes, if I’m in the mood. But usually I get disgusted with people in public around the holiday season. Shoppers in general are so rude. Rude to each other, and rude to retail store workers. Maybe it’s just because I’ve worked in retail numerous times; but this American attitude of “I am the most important person in the world, serve me NOW!!” really gets under my skin and lays eggs.
So I shop on Amazon.com and whatnot. But mostly I’m having fun with the making and baking. (No actual baking has been done yet. That will have to be done closer to actual xmas.) I don’t want to post here what I’m making, in case anyone for whom I am making something reads this (which I doubt, but you never know), but let’s just say I am having fun discovering and embellishing my artistic side.
And it provides a nice distraction from studying. E-Commerce exam is tomorrow at 5:00. I haven’t studied as much as I probably should have, but I’m staying home all day tomorrow to prepare. Today was the NMI “Project Show-off” thing and for the most part it was a big waste of my time. However, CNN was there and they interviewed some of us and it might air at 1:00 on Saturday. (I’m assuming 1:00 PM.)
Databases exam Thursday. CS exam Friday. More NMI presentations Monday. And then I will be FREE to enjoy my well-earned break!!