Mac OS X Lion (Oh look, a blog post!)

Those who know me can personally attest to the fact that I am an Apple Fan.  The only Apple device I refuse to purchase is the iPhone, instead choosing to go with the Blackberry Bold (what can I say, I like cryptography).  I have always been a fan of Apple’s policy of not including long, cumbersome product keys in their operating system installations.  At this point in time, however, I am more than a little unhappy with their most recent distribution method.

I understand that using the App Store to deliver an operating system is a bold move.  I understand that choosing to use the App Store to deliver the update is a perfect way of showcasing their ability to build app stores that people use.  I also understand that using the App Store increases the chances that people will upgrade, and will upgrade immediately at that.  What I fail to understand, however, is that Apple didn’t provide any alternative methods for procuring their latest creation.

I live in an area that is, shall we say, remote, and the nearest Apple store is about three hours away.  As far as I know, I have one of the faster internet connections available to the area.  My laptop is relatively new.  For all intents and purposes, my setup is as ideal as I can make it.  Downloading the Lion installer?  Took six hours.  Six hours!  Now, granted, part of that was due to operator error.  I will admit that, in my attempt to create a backup of the installation image I caused the entire installer to be removed from my computer (it would have been nice for Apple to step in and say “By the way, when you quit the installer, even if you haven’t begun the process, your computer will immediately delete the installer and the App Store will mark the update ‘Installed’, preventing you from re-downloading it.”)

After it finally downloaded on my second laptop, I copied the installer over to my external hard drive BEFORE touching the actual, running installer, and began the painless, efficient install process.  It really was a painless install, unfortunately by that time the downloading fiasco had already soured my mood.  I do now know, however, that the installer will run quite well off of an external.  Tomorrow I think I will try to burn the installer to a DVD as well to free up space on my external.

At the moment, I have managed to install Mac OS X Lion on two computers, and I am in the process of backing up the remaining computers that are to receive the update, which I will then install tomorrow.

Okay, hills, we need to have a discussion.

I don’t like you, and I’m pretty sure you’re not too fond of me.  Believe it or not, I’ve come to grips with this, and I’m actually okay with it.  If I had my wishes, I would simply replace all of the stairs with elevators.  I’ve seen it done before.

In case you haven’t guessed, I’m back at school again, almost halfway through my second week of classes and third week living here.  And the hills are killing me.  I remember now why I was glad that I lived in the center of campus last year.  I only had to go up the really long hill once a week for the first semester, and whenever I felt like going to Gened the second semester (Which of COURSE was EVERY class time…).  This semester, however, I live at the top of a very tall hill, directly across from the really long hill that I abhor.  And that I have to climb, every day.  At least once.  I probably should have factored this in when I was choosing a place to live.  Not that I’m regretting my housing choice, quite the opposite, in fact, my room is actually perfect for me.  I just wish the building was more centrally located (i.e. not directly adjoining Life Sciences on the outer reaches of campus).

Living right next to life sciences is an interesting experience.  The first couple of nights I was here, there wasn’t a horse living in the corral there yet, it was just spending days there.  And there weren’t any llamas outside.  And the owl hadn’t relocated to the trees below my window.  In the past week, however, there has been a fairly steady stream of seemingly random animals taking up residence in the enclosures below my window.  Including an owl, which, until the other night, wasn’t there.  I have now discovered that having geothermal heating and cooling in the building is definitely going to be a good thing, as I’m not really able to sleep at night with the window open.  I’m not actually sure where the llamas are at the moment as they don’t seem to be in their corral.

The University has also decided to expand Life Sciences out here on the outskirts of campus, and hence have begun running pile drivers at 6 A.M.  Even on Saturday.  The past couple of days they’ve been excavating right at the entrance of our parking lot.  I can honestly say that I have no idea why they need a pit that large, that close to the road, unless they’re extending the geothermal system to the new buildings, or they’re trying to connect with existing utilities.  I suppose, for the moment, it shall continue to be one of the great unsolved mysteries of campus.

I’m not actually complaining about my dorm at all.  I have an almost floor-to-ceiling window that has a superb south facing view of the Palouse, which gets highlighted each day with the sunrise and sunset.  On the other side of the hall is the quiet study lounge, which overlooks campus to the north, and stays at a fairly steady 68 degrees Fahrenheit.  My room, so far, has stayed at a fairly constant 74 degrees, even without active air conditioning.  I also have found that I like most of my classes this semester.  We’ll see how my Com 265, “The Murrow Legacy”, goes.  I’m going to avoid passing judgement at the moment.  It’s probably safer that way.

Speaking of classes, I do believe my laundry is just about finished.  Time to get ready for Astronomy.

If only…

If only I could remember to continue blogging during the summer months, when I am (supposedly) not doing anything of consequence.  Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to.  It would seem that a combination of completing long overdue home repairs, along with taking a course through the local Community College all seem to be conspiring against me.  On the positive side, the patio is finished, most of the drywall is up in my room, and my closet is finished.  Unfortunately for me, I have to be back on campus in less than 3 weeks.  There goes my summer.

The past couple of weeks have had their ups and downs.  On Sunday, my car decided that it no longer wanted to drive.  This might not have been a problem, except I was driving down the road when it decided that.  Luckily for me, the road that I was driving on was just in the school zone here in Dayton, and I was only going about 25 MPH.  Regardless, it wasn’t pleasant.  At all.  The crowning moment, of course, was when it decided that it wouldn’t turn on.  Interesting fact, though: a Mercedes-Benz stretch sedan is remarkably easy to push.  I really never wanted to find that out.  There are, however, some perks to driving a Mercedes, even a twenty year old model.  Their roadside assistance is impeccable.  It took a little while, and it took a couple of phone calls, but yesterday at 1:40 P.M. the second tow truck showed up in our alley to take my car in to the shop.  And yes, it took two tow trucks to get my car to the Tri Cities.  See, apparently my car is too long for a regular tow truck.  No, it had to be a flat bed tow truck.

At the same time that my car was…having issues, shall we say, my mom was in Spokane, picking up a friend of ours from our days back in Virginia, back before we starting moving around the world, who was in town and decided to stop by.  It has been fun catching up, hearing how everything has changed since we left.  So much as changed, it makes it seem like so long ago that we left.  Unfortunately it was only a short stay, and she must return home tomorrow morning.  At 6 A.M., from Spokane.  It should be a fun trip.  Needless to say, I won’t be sleeping tonight, instead I’m planning on just staying up until we have to leave (which is actually in about an hour).

In a way, I’m looking forward to starting school again.  It will be nice to catch up with my friends from Pullman, and to get back into a routine of work and school.  I definitely needed a break after last semester, but I’m just about ready to get back into the swing of school.

I’m going to go off on a bit of a tangent here, so bear with me.  The other day, I was watching TV, and I happened to see an ad for one of HP’s laptops, the HP Envy, and it struck me how unfortunate that name really was.  See, the HP Envy looks remarkably similar to a laptop, manufactured by another company, a small company, mostly unheard of, that goes by Apple.  Their offices are located in Cupertino, and they make computers for a bit of a niche market.  Oh wait…  It would seem that HP is only just a little envious of Apple’s line of high powered performance laptops, made specifically for media creation.

Anyhow, now that it’s almost 2 in the morning, and I have a long drive ahead of me, and this post seems to have rambled a bit more than I thought it would, I’m going to go ahead and sign off.  Hopefully the next post won’t be so long in the writing.

My cat lives a secret double life. As a gargoyle.

I have this wall, in my bedroom, that is made out of glass block.  It isn’t quite finished, because we ran into a couple of issues with the dimensions.  The resulting space at the top, is, as my cat discovered, the perfect place to sit.  And wait.  And stare at people as they come up the stairs and through the door.  I’ve actually been startled a couple of times coming up the stairs late at night to find my cat staring down at me.  (My cat, mind you, is getting quite large, and has a tendency to pounce.  She also likes to grab at my ankles when I’m walking around).

I realized, recently, that I’m terrible at keeping a blog running.  I just get too wrapped up in the minutia of life, and I forget to blog about it.  It’s a common problem for me.  I’m working on it.  I’m not sure if it’s a sign of too little caffeine or too much, but most likely the cure involve more coffee.  Be right back.

Last weekend, my parents decided that we should go camping.  In Oregon.  At the beach.  Apparently, it was camping-trip-of-12-years-ago, take 2.  Which I vividly remembered as I walked into the campground and was inundated with a flood of memories from when I was 5 years old and camping in Oregon, when we were driving down from Canada (or to – I have trouble remembering sometimes.  I was only 5) before heading to the Azores, Portugal for 9 months.  For 5-year-old me, the tidal pools at Haystack Rock were mind blowing.  I had never seen anything like that before, and it was quite impressive.  The most memorable experience, however, was not the tidal pools, but the skeleton of a ship (the Peter Iredale) on the black sand beach covered in sand dollars that had washed up with the surf.  I was from the East coast, where they don’t have any sand dollars.  I had never seen any before in my life.  The day that we went was cold, and grey, and very misty.  Essentially, we were the only people out on the beach, which meant that the entire shore was littered with whole sand dollars, which I hastily collected.  Unfortunately for me, my entire stash was left in Oregon as we continued our Eastward journey.

I have to say, though, I’m not the biggest fan of camping.  The combination of no proper showers, along with no real internet connection, and very little proper caffeine (until the last day, when we decided enough was enough and went to Starbucks).  Yes, I’m addicted, yes, it is possible that I  have a problem, no, I don’t plan on doing anything about it.  There are so many different things that you can be addicted to, and really, caffeine is mostly harmless.  Like humans.  (And if you don’t get the reference, please go to the closest bookseller, pick up a copy of “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Universe”, and begin reading.  And don’t stop until you’ve finished it).  All in all, however, the weekend was fairly pleasant, especially on Sunday morning when I woke up at 5 to go search the tidal pools.  When I got there, the tide was almost completely out, and the pools were completely exposed.  It was a rare opportunity, as by the time that we left, around 7:30, the tide was already on its way back in, and the pools once again were covered.

At the moment, I am working on installing Windows 7 on a netbook (an Asus EEEPC 901) for my Dad, since his laptop has decided to retire.  Slightly earlier than it was supposed to, unfortunately.  However, we shall see how Windows 7 works, and I shall (hopefully) write a blog post about it.  In the meantime, I’m off to find a large, friendly font in which to print “Don’t Panic” on.

Gotta love construction

It’s been a while I started the renovations on my room.  Home improvements, however, are a little bit difficult.  See, the biggest problem is staying motivated.  When I first started working, it was pretty easy.  I needed a place to live comfortably, and my bedroom obviously needed help.  Unfortunately, as it reached completion, it became easier to look towards other things, like school and work, instead of working on my bedroom.  Therefore, things like building the custom, arched, solid wood door for my bedroom pretty much got pushed to the back burner for the better part of a year.  It wasn’t too terrible, since I haven’t spent a lot of time here at the house for the past 8 months, being at school and all.  Coming home for the summer, therefore, has caused me to reevaluate the necessity of having a bedroom door.

This past week, my dad and I built a door.  Not just any door, mind you, but an arched door.  Of course, those are difficult to find on the market.  They involve a lot of cutting with a jigsaw, along with sanding down all of the edges that might or might not have been made perfect by the jigsaw.  Given that it was the first door that I had ever built, I don’t feel too terrible about it.  It was actually a lot easier to build than one might expect, once the template was made.  Making the template was, shall we say, interesting.  I was fairly pleased, however, because I was able to create a full size template with Adobe Illustrator and my trusty inkjet printer.  I never realized just how important it is to have a really, really good inkjet printer that will allow you to print all the way to the edge of a sheet of paper.  See, traditionally, printers don’t allow printing all the way to the edge of the page, instead requiring there to be a solid margin.  There are a number of reasons for this, and there are also a number of ways of getting around this.  I’ve done it before, when I was experimenting with printing my own stationary, which is an expensive habit, in case you were wondering.  Adobe products typically allow fairly advanced manipulations, so that if you were to, say, print a full scale model of a door, you could, without having to worry about wether or not you will have to cut off any white margin on the sides.  By creating a scale drawing using vectors, I was able to scale up the model to full size before printing it on multiple pieces of paper, which I then taped together.  On a side note, duct tape is probably one of the best adhesives ever invented.

Anyhow, back to the door.  It weighs a ton due to the fact that it has a solid plywood core, and is clad with both ceda and pine.  It’s a very pretty door, as long as your fingers don’t get caught between the door and the doorjam.  Of course, if you were to have that happen, I’m sure that there are reconstructive surgeries that could repair any damage.  The door really is that heavy.

Later Update: I started this post a long time ago.  And never finished it.  Therefore, I shall publish it, and start anew.

Cathedral Arches and Netbooks (Or, my summer so far)

Summer is an odd time.  It’s hard to stay motivated goofing off while at the same time you have to manage jobs and/or school.  It’s also easy to forget to do things, like write blog posts (oops).  Since it has been nearly a month since my last blog post, I feel that I should fill you in on what I’ve been accomplishing over the (almost complete) month that I have been away from school.  First of all, my summers are never quiet.  I don’t actually think there has ever been a summer that we haven’t done SOMETHING (day trips to Gotland, Goteborg, trips to museums in D.C., camping trips, and house building).  Yes, house building.  A couple of years ago, my parents got bored over the summer, and decided to build a house.  Well, actually, that’s a bit of a hyperbole.  We had been planning on building an addition to our house for some time, we just hadn’t quite rented the backhoe required to break ground.  However, we finally got around to breaking ground and spent the remainder of the year building our addition.  Little did we know that at that time the following summer we would be packing all of our belongings and heading to post, but it was “character building”.

This summer (what little of it there has been) I have been taking trips.  Day trip to Spokane, day trip to Pullman for work, and then twice to Seattle (and more trips to Seattle to come over the summer).  It seems that I just can’t seem to get enough driving out of my car.  Of course, I am working towards putting another 9,000 miles on it so that I can get the first Mercedes longevity award (every 155,000 miles you get an award when you own a Classic Mercedes – and as of this month, my car is officially a ‘Classic’).

Of course, the real thing that I’ve been doing to take up any and all available free time that I might have had is finishing the remodel on my room.  See, a couple of years ago, when we moved to Washington, the plan was to live in this house only during the summer, so we didn’t need to worry about any grand scale remodels.  However, through a long string of events, it turned out that we would be living here quite a bit.  Towards that end, I began working to make my bedroom as livable as possible (when we moved it in had polka dot wallpaper on the walls and some sort of weird linoleum on the floor).  But, this is my bedroom.  And if it’s not hard, it isn’t fun (which has become my motto of sorts – I should probably change that).  Anyhow, since my room is on the rather small side, I decided that I wanted to make it look like a ship captain’s quarters, complete with mahogany paneling on the walls and a hardwood floor.  Well, the panels on the walls were (relatively) simple to complete, and not too long after I began I had a fairly basic overview of what my room would look like.  When we came back from Ireland, however, we decided that my room was too small.  The hallway had a rather lot of wasted space, as did the bathroom,  and we were able to expand my bedroom.  This was around February 2009.  With worrying about graduation and beginning at WSU, though, the construction was put on the back burner, and it never got completed.  This summer, since I have to work from my room, there cannot be construction materials strewn about my room.  Therefore, I have been working as hard as possible (between trips) to complete the work that I start so long ago.  Pictures will be posted, but I haven’t taken them yet, so I can’t exactly post them yet.  But once I take the photos then I’ll upload them for everyone to see.

And the netbooks portion of the title will have to wait for another post, for I am both out of time and in danger of losing readers due to length.

Last night at school

As you may have noticed, I have changed the theme of my blog.  Mostly, the theme that I have chosen this theme as a stop-gap measure until I can move to a custom theme, which hopefully I will design over the summer.  I have a couple of working theories regarding what it will look like, however I haven’t yet figured out all of the details.  I do know, however, that typography is going to play a major role in any new blog designs.

Tomorrow morning I shall begin taking my last four exams of the year – hopefully I won’t fall asleep during the first two (both are on international relations, one is the final and then I also have to take the midterm).  I’m not too terribly worried about those two – this evening a couple of my friends and I went into Moscow Idaho to spend some time studying the material that we were given in class, and was then subsequently fleshed out by a fellow student.  The other two should also fairly straightforward (I sincerely hope!) and I shouldn’t have too much trouble.  So far I’ve been doing fairly well in Speech, and the other one is Gened.  As long as you know the circumference of the earth, you get extra credit.  It’s Gened.

It’s weird, now that I’m down to the last night here at school.  It doesn’t quite feel like it’s actually the last night here (but that’s almost to be expected – every time that I’ve moved in the past it hasn’t felt real until after it happened).  Tomorrow, I’m going to say goodbye to my home for the past two semesters, the building that I’ve grown to both love and hate, with all of its weird quirks and abnormalities, never (hopefully) to return.  Strangely enough, that doesn’t seem to be bothering me at all.  I’m more looking forward to being home, with my 24″ Cinema Display again.  I will miss my friends here, certainly more than the actual location.  But in just a few short months most of us will be returning, and those who aren’t returning to campus will be sorely missed.

On that note, I’m off to try and actually sleep tonight, prior to having to be up again at 6:30 in the morning (gotta get my coffee, if nothing else, before an exam.  I should probably get two or three cups, just to be on the safe side).

Today, Robert learned that, as tech, he should never be allowed to be bored.

When I get bored, I generally find solutions to long standing problems.  See, in the lab where I work, we’ve been having trouble with Adobe CS4.  Mostly Acrobat, but Dreamweaver has recently been having some problems as well.  Microsoft Word is also troublesome, but that’s what you get for running Microsoft Office 2004.  Or any form of Microsoft Office on Mac.  I’m not just saying that because I despise Office.  Microsoft Office 2004 was built for older hardware, and is slowing our computers down.  At the moment, in my new capacity as the computer tech for the lab, I would like to try and keep our computers running smoothly.

Yesterday I came into the lab to get my computer ready to start working, which was good, because there’s actually a lot of software that I have to install, apparently.  (If I could find all the disks for that software, that would be great.  Likelihood of that actually happening?  Nonexistent.)  Fortunately, the Remote Desktop disks were in the cabinet, where they belong, along with their serial numbers.  *Whew*.  One giant application installed, 399 to go.  Feeling fairly confident, I then tried to install the Server Admin Tools (which, of course, correspond to our server).  And that’s when I remembered.  Apple might be a decent company, but they really like ensuring that you continue upgrading your software.  Having purchased my Mac over the summer, I immediately upgraded to Snow Leopard as soon as I could.  It made sense, considering the upgrade was $10.  Unfortunately, since we are still running Leopard in the lab, and are unable to upgrade, I can’t run the server admin software without re-installing Leopard on my laptop.  I’m considering purchasing another hard drive, just so that I can have Leopard on a separate disk.  It does seem a bit like a waste of money, but I already have to have a separate drive for storing my photos and such (who knew a 500GB hard drive was so small!).

On a different, less technical note, my dorm room is almost completely packed up into boxes and sitting in the middle of my room.  It’s always weird, packing up to leave somewhere.  You would think, that by now, I would be used to it, but I still always worry that I’ll forget something, something important.  So far, to the best of my knowledge, I haven’t, but that’s not to say that I won’t.  Fortunately, it looks like I will be able to take my time clearing out my room, hopefully, if I can manage to get my car back up here on Saturday when I finally move out.  That is one of the great benefits of living so close to school – even though my car is still at home, it isn’t so far a way that it can’t be brought up to campus so that I can do things such as pack out my room, and not have to worry about fitting everything into my sister’s Mustang.  Sure, that car can fit a decent amount of stuff.  However, she still has to get her stuff out of the dorm, and there’s no way that all of my stuff, plus all of her stuff, will fit in that car, along with me.  The logistics of moving out can prove to be troublesome.

Working here in the lab has almost completely crushed my last remaining sense of goodwill towards my fellow students here.  You can only answer the question of “How do I save something” or “Does the printer just ‘know’ to print in color?” so many times before you begin to lose, bit by bit, the last few shreds of your sanity. It’s nice to know that tomorrow I will work my last shift as a Consultant.  I like working here, and I like working as a Consultant.  It just takes too much out of my day!  As the tech, however, I should have a fair amount of time freed up for me to do things like, I don’t know, go to class and eat.  Minor things that really aren’t that important in the long run, right?

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go log someone else of the computer.

I think my suitemate is a sociopath.

My finals started today at 10 o’clock this morning.  Unfortunately, my day started at 7.  Originally, I was going to do some laundry this morning, so that I would actually have some laundry for today.  That didn’t happen.  The thought was there, but that was about it, unfortunately.  Instead, I peacefully slept in for a few extra minutes.  I never realized what a few extra minutes of sleep can do for you (well, that and the copious amount of coffee that I consumed this morning.)  Now, you might ask why on earth I would get up at such an early hour when my final didn’t start until 10?  I was still completely deluded and couldn’t find an excuse to go back to sleep.

Last week, I decided to stop drinking coffee, so that I could lower my caffeine tolerance levels back down to acceptable levels before finals week, at which point they would once again skyrocket up to true addiction levels.  It seemed like a good idea at the time, but I’m certainly happy to be drinking coffee again.  There’s just something about a good caffeine induced haze.  And yes, I’m kidding.  Just to clarify.  Fortunately, I went to Starbucks this morning and got myself some coffee before heading off to my final.

My final was interesting – I got to the room half an hour early to ensure that I would have enough time to get a decent seat before the room started filling up.  Unfortunately, the person sitting to my left, who came in after I did, took up all of his seat, and most of mine.  Now, traditionally, I have personal space requirements.  I don’t like to sit too close to people, and I don’t like have my writing arm bumped every time I try and go to write a sentence.  Especially while writing 8 pages of short essay answers.  However, I believe that the exam went quite well and it provided a semi-agreeable start to Finals week.  The coffee didn’t hurt either.

Portland, procrastination, and finals. All wrapped up in one.

Spring has finally decided to make an appearance, breaking through the cold and dreary clouds that had covered our city for the past three months, which, unfortunately, means that we once again have arrived at Finals.  I’m not really complaining, because the weather change was definitely needed, and, well, quite frankly, I’m tired of being in school.  I only wish that I hadn’t procrastinated quite so much over the course of spring semester.  Oh who am I kidding.  The only way I work is under pressure.  Part of that procrastination, of course, involved not posting anything to my blog.  Hopefully that will change.

On Friday I got to drive my car down to Portland, Oregon, which provided a much needed break from the monotony that my life has become.  And an opportunity to drive my car.  I’m pretty sure that I was most excited about the driving part, not the break from monotony. There’s just something relaxing about driving a car that makes 80 MPH feel like 50, with zero engine noise and very little road noise.  I looked in at the engine when I bought it, only to find that the hood actually has a good 6 inches of sound proof foam under it to minimize the amount of engine noise from the passengers’ perspective.  It makes a very good roadtripping car, as long as you don’t have a car seat in the back.  Even with the car seat, however, the ride wasn’t too cramped as far I can tell, judging from the lack of complaint from the backseat passengers (more like backseat drivers, actually).  My biggest complaint with my car is the stereo.  Somewhere along the way, some genius decided to replace the factory installed cassette deck with a CD player.  Now, I enjoy having a CD player don’t get me wrong.  However, when they installed the stereo, they seem to have ignored the wiring diagram, and so the only speakers that turn on are on the right hand side of the car.  For the driver, this isn’t so much of a problem, except the stereo volume must be turned up significantly higher.  For the passenger, on the other hand, the loudest speaker is right at ear level.  I’m sure you can see where this is going.  After 5 hours of the stereo playing, the front passenger often loses the ability to hear.  Of course, when the car goes over a significant bump in the road, all the speakers function properly.  Rather suddenly, in fact.

Driving to Portland during the day is fantastic.  The road travels right next to the Columbia River for most of the trip, and right now, everything is a vibrant shade of green.  It really surprised me as to how the scenery changed as we crossed the border into Oregon from Washington – it went from dry and mostly dead to vibrant and very much alive.  The fact that it was such a pleasant drive almost made me want to slow down and just enjoy the ride.  Almost.  My V8, however, won the resulting argument. It’s amazing how persuasive the purr of a well tuned German V8 can be.

The trip back from Portland was a completely different story. The speed limit was too low, and I had to constantly force myself to slow down. After the rain stopped, the road was dry and clear, and it was very, very easy to allow the speedometer to creep up toward 80 MPH. I did have to stop, and sleep for a couple of hours, because I was starting to fall asleep at the wheel. It’s always a little bit different driving with a car full of kids – they have a tendency to complain if you crank up the music and open the sunroof while driving 75 MPH down the freeway at 1 in the morning.

On Monday I got to work and I was informed by a coworker that the person I had been job shadowing had left, thus leaving the position open for me. I’m certainly not complaining, but I was expecting to take over the job slowly, over the summer. No matter, I shall just have to jump in to the reading that was left for me (which I’m actually kind of excited to get started on – I’ve always wanted to learn things like Applescript, and instead of having to just guess and check to learn, or to try and find a hideously outdated book in our library system, the book at I need is now sitting in my room). I shall have to now take some time to build the scripts that should inevitably make my job so much easier. I’m a firm believer in the notion of replacing people with very small shell scripts. Even if i don’t get paid as much, it really doesn’t matter. If a series of shell scripts can maintain the server, my job gets so much easier.

Now that we’re at the end of the semester, I’m starting to think that I might actually miss some of my classes, such as polisci 103. Never before have I had a class that was so useful for writing blog posts and English 300 tutorials. Originally, I saw it as a really giant waste of time, but now I’m starting to realize that by making me actually sit down with a computer (or iPad) in front of me, in an environment where I’m supposed to be typing anyways, I can actually get a lot accomplished. It allows me to find a way to put my rather jumbled thoughts into semi coherent words on my screen.

And now I remember why I stopped eating breakfast. On mornings when I don’t have time for breakfast before class, I end up starving. Great.