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Journal 2000-09

Current entries

2000-09-30, Sat (Day 252, temperature at 08:32: 21.9°C, difference: -0.8°C): I dreamed that my family’s home was painted and I was painting a room in Parrish I believe. The group I was working with to do various projects included Jesse, John, and Tom. I came up with the suggestion that since Parrish wasn’t going to be renovated for a few years, that maybe the exterior should be painted. They had a hard time understanding my idea and then when they did, they didn’t think it was necessary. I was going to show them the unpainted ramp on the west side of Parrish and the unpainted plywood panels on the fifth floor that had people’s names on them. The panel towards the left (The Phoenix’s office) but not the extreme left (the Student Publications office), which didn’t have a panel, had my last name on it in black. The lettering on the panel was big enough to be visible from the ground. This is similar to real life where there is the word “Swarthmore” written on the inside of the Willets elevator door as it was related to the construction of the door.

I spent the day going through the e-mail that I haven’t been reading over the past month. While I finished doing this soon after 22:00, I tacked on other things that kept me up until 06:40 the next day.

At 02:00 the fire alarm went off and continued for about five minutes. It turned out that an errant Frisbee triggered the alarm.

2000-09-29, Fri (Day 251, temperature at 11:27: 22.7°C, difference: -0.2°C): I remembered to take a temperature reading when I got back from class so that’s why the time is late in the morning. In set design, we started transferring our composition readings from layer to layer by a similar method that I tried a while ago for the fun of it. What I would do is cover the back of a piece of paper in crayon and then write firmly on the other side. With a blank piece of paper underneath the impressions would transfer through in the color of the crayon. In class we went over the lines on the backside of the top layer with graphite and then traced through, creating the lines on the bottom, final layer.

The McCabe achievement award informal lunch was this afternoon at 13:00 in Tarble. Six and a half people showed up. Afterwards, I went to the farewell reception for Robin Mamlet who will soon be the Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid at Stanford.

For the rest of the day, I finished going through my files and started backing up. I needed three more Zip disks the first time I backed up but after a fair amount of pruning I just got it to work. Instead of seeing the movie “Top Gun” in DuPont tonight, moviegoers saw “Sneakers” instead. The movie distributor only sent two reels for “Top Gun” and neither of them was the first. I thought “Sneakers” was a good movie.

2000-09-28, Thu (Day 250, temperature at 07:20: 22.9°C, difference: +0.8°C): A 28 page Phoenix came out today, a historical occurrence. Even though there was more stuff to put on the web, I still was able to get it done in the same amount of time. In the afternoon I worked on my set design compositional rendering in the design studio and got drafting tape stuck on my shirt that other people and I later found out.

While I was at The Phoenix meeting tonight, the dorm consultant was able to get networking to work on John’s computer for a brief period of time and then it broke again. When I got back to Willets after 22:00, I launched into a whirlwind of activity, which Tom followed suit to fix John’s computer. Many things are now working.

2000-09-27, Wed (Day 249, temperature at 07:19: 22.1°C, difference: -0.8°C): I shut the window to the room a few days ago, but the temperature still has been dropping. Of course the heat hasn’t turned on yet, but I am getting the impression that Willets is a leaky building, far more than Mertz.

I had my psych attachment today in DuPont. These hour-and-fifteen-minute discussion periods four times a semester are the extent of my afternoon classes. I went to dinner at 17:30, like yesterday, only this time on purpose since Third Wing meets then in Sharples.

2000-09-26, Tue (Day 248, temperature at 07:22: 22.9°C, difference: -0.6°C): I dreamed I was in a Ridley High School French classroom. Faruq was giving a psych overview or sample talk. At the end he wants the syllabi back but I can’t find it until after he leaves. Madame Zitarelli I think is here now and Adam is talking to her and something happens that prompts her to give a pop quiz about the meaning of a la il y a.

In the afternoon I was encouraged to make changes to my social life. I’m looking towards Third Wing, the libertarian campus group that Ben George has reinvigorated. It was 16:52 when I dozed off in McCabe reading my psych attachment articles anticipating waking up in eight minutes. However, I didn’t wake up until 17:30 and I was in a confused state. My nap was so deep I don’t even remember that half-hour block of time.

I apparently did get caught up with my sleep, as I didn’t fall asleep in the library this night and the drawn-out September Storm rain stopped later this afternoon.

2000-09-25, Mon (Day 247, temperature at 08:00: 23.5°C, difference: -2.0°C): Today was a rainy and dreary day. I had a hard time getting started in the morning and I kept falling asleep in the library. This afternoon, I followed up on an idea I got before I went to bed last night. The women’s bathroom is right next to my room and the light from the window comes into our room especially at night. The NASA posters hanging on my side of the wall are dark so that helps in making the room more conducive to sleep, but there still is a portion of wall and ceiling that does much of the light reflecting. So I got black poster board from the bookstore and hung it on the wall and ceiling right by the window. The room is now noticeably darker even during the daytime as well as at night.

2000-09-24, Sun (Day 246, temperature at 07:40: 25.5°C, difference: +1.5°C): Most of the day was spent going through and deleting files so that way I have less stuff to backup. At night I went to Betsy and Liane’s room to see “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.”

2000-09-23, Sat (Day 245, temperature at 07:18: 24.0°C, difference: +0.1°C): Justin and Nathan hosted a Phoenix Alumni Weekend, which I found to be very good. Afterwards more progress was made with the online edition through discussion.

Dinner tonight with Jesse and Tom soon turned into a debate about politics and the feasibility of libertarianism with the political systems of industrialized countries.

The movie tonight in LPAC was “Keeping the Faith.” I found this to be a teary-eyed movie about love and religion.

2000-09-22, Fri (Day 244, temperature at 08:15 [I am tired]: 23.9°C, difference: -2.9°C): Upon waking up I dozed in and out of sleep trying to write in my journal until about 08:30. At this point I only had enough time to both walk and eat a rushed breakfast or just eat a relaxed breakfast. I choose the latter option and then went to class.

The entire afternoon was essentially spent working on The Phoenix online edition of the voter’s guide for Student Council elections. John and I went to Beardsley to pick up his repaired Dell computer, which broke when he arrived this semester and was taken to the hardware tech on --09-07 according to the work order. Apparently the only thing that was messing the computer up besides the boot sector virus on the hard drive was the amount of dust inside. The networking cards were removed and reseated and everything worked fine.

This evaluation was hardly the case when we set the machine up. The first problem was no sound but Tom found the driver to that. The second problem was no network and we couldn’t figure that one out yet. John had a train to catch so he left during this trial. The error rate still seems high to me so there may be many software configuration issues to handle.

Jesse and I watched “The Talented Mr. Ripley” in LPAC Cinema. This movie can be summed up as well done cinematically and musically but for a depressing story that shows a dark side of the human condition.

I actually got in bed at 23:00.

2000-09-21, Thu (Day 243, temperature at 07:21: 26.8°C, difference: +2.8°C): I dreamed I was watching a music concert of many performance types in a big middle school style auditorium. I was sitting near the front center. Later I was in McCabe and workers were doing electrical repairs. They ran wires down stack aisles to two pipes near the window where I am studying. I move my whole study carrel back and parallel with the one behind me. I offer to help and I do so by screwing this electrical plate on while the electricians find out they lost a screw. They ask me if I got up anywhere and I say I went to the bathroom before they came, but otherwise not between then. The plate still had the extra paper backing on it, which I took off. Also the outlet screwed in the lower right corner of the receptacle. Finally, I was walking north past the Morton train station and was starting to change direction to head home.

I get back from Philosophy and attempt to open the CD player on my computer before I start doing The Phoenix. However, the door won’t open and the computer did not recognize that it even had a CD drive. I tried playing Antenne Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, but that soon stopped playing. At this point my agitation level was on the rise. I was able to get this week’s issue of The Phoenix up by 11:00.

In the afternoon I worked on fixing my computer. The CD drive did not respond with fewer extensions so after looking at the iMac Troubleshooting booklet, I used a paperclip to pop the drive open manually. The drive was working a week ago, but now there is a fair amount of dust on the tray. A gold-like metal strip was also dirty and cleaning that probably fixed the problem. Apparently that thing was so dirty the computer thought there was a CD inserted even when there wasn’t.

The AppleScript problem first seen yesterday took the afternoon to fix. It turns out there is a numerical limit to how big a disk size AppleScript can count. The limit is over 2 billion bytes since it uses an integer to store the value. To figure out what the limit was, I needed to copy the startup disk to the Spare partition and remove and add various files to see if there was an actual file problem. When that appeared unlikely I looked for a size limit. I also changed the reminder folders script, which broke along with the disk size script since the former was also asking for the size of the drive. That call was unnecessary to search for reminder folders so I changed the code where now it ignores the two drive partitions making the script run much faster.

Before I went to bed after 01:30, I deleted unneeded invisible files since I have a direct copy of the data on Spare. I also started general pruning of the file structure.

2000-09-20, Wed (Day 242, temperature at 07:32: 24.0°C, difference: -0.6°C): Due to the permanent decline in class members for Theatre 4a, the oral reports were reassigned and before I had one but now I have three. Bummer. I worked on Linguistics homework in the late afternoon and evening.

At the end of the day, my startup AppleScript started giving random errors for the “Save reminder folders” part even after checking the drives with Disk First Aid and rebuilding the desktop. I’ll need to debug to see what item is causing the problem.

2000-09-19, Tue (Day 241, temperature at 07:26: 24.6°C, difference: +2.1°C): I dreamed the SEPTA tracks through Ridley Park are now a large river like the Delaware that is about to overflow. The bridge crossing this new river is a modern stone non-elevated walkway with guardrails of chains like for the Swarthmore campus walkways. My partner and I can feel the river pushing the bridge up on us as we cross from north to south.

Today was a rainy day and normally I find this to be positive, but today’s rain was downright depressing. I’m not too sure why it was, but there also were a lot of problems with today as well.

I met with Jen Barrington from career planning at 15:00 about taking a personality test to help find out what I am interested in. The safer sex workshop in Willets was tonight at 22:00 and since I didn’t get to see the video last year and in general my Mertz hall got cheated in terms of the quality of the workshop, I went to this one. I did learn something new: Std’s can be transmitted through clothes washers, making bleach detergents suddenly important. I also got to see the video, which was good in terms of quality and content.

My computer has developed a case of insomnia where it refuses to sleep on its own. I had a hard time waking the computer up and when I did, it hung. I deleted the “Display Preferences” file to see if recreating the preferences fixes the problem.

2000-09-18, Mon (Day 240, temperature at 07:20: 22.5°C, difference: +0.8°C): This morning instead of going back to Willets to change and go to the gym, I got dressed like I was going to the gym to go for my walk and after breakfast went directly to the tennis center. I saved some time by removing this extra return to my dorm and it lessens the feeling that I am running back and forth all over the place first thing in the morning.

In set design we started drawing today and memories of drafting dating back to the middle school sprang briefly to mind.

At 18:30 I was picked up to go home. The computer at home was in nice shape and my brother Thomas especially was real excited to see me.

2000-09-17, Sun (Day 239, temperature at 09:29: 21.7°C, difference: -1.3°C [the room is slowly turning into a Mertz iceberg]): The Willets barbecue was today at 18:00. Almost everyone decided to show up at that time leading to long lines. I spent more time waiting in the grill line than I did eating. Also, there was sort of a soda run so I was without a drink (save for Diet Coke) since I didn’t grab a drink early. Most of the food ran out well before when people started leaving.

After the barbecue I went through Jesse’s REM collection trying to find the title of this song that I didn’t know the lyrics to. In the end I still could not figure out which song it was.

2000-09-16, Sat (Day 238, temperature at 07:18: 23.0°C, difference: -4.9°C [fan running for most of last evening]): I continued upgrading my computer, finishing most of it by the mid-afternoon. For the optimization I ended up running Norton’s Speed Disk and then I ran TechTool and that worked fine. I imagine there were other solutions as well. I also upgraded all four web browsers (Mac and Windows).

Network registration, i.e. the Internet slowdown, is Tuesday for Willets. I did some calculations today and even though a 128 Kbps speed sounds like a lot, it really is only 16 KB per second or just 8% of 200 KB per second, which is what a good download speed is on average. The thing though is that with a 10 Mbps pipe, the college can still only support a maximum of 80 users transferring data at 128 Kbps. However, they could only support 6 people downloading at 200 KB per second. There are probably 2,000 people here that use the Internet connection although not all at once.

Since I was busy with the computer upgrades, I rushed through doing the wash. It turns out dryer number five doesn’t want to accept my quarters although it works fine for other people. I also tried the one-hour straight run of $1.00. I put money in all at once on one machine and on the second, I put in half of the change, started it, and then added the remaining half. Both dryers went past the first cycle, but the incremental one (dryer six) seemed to want to dry forever, so my whites would have eventually been completely torched.

I also skipped Sharples for breakfast and lunch and only went there for dinner. Since I didn’t go for my walk today, I didn’t leave the dorm until right before 16:00 to go to a Phoenix meeting. In the publications office running the Iris photo browser on the football images just would not work since it kept giving a supposedly erroneous out of memory error even after giving the script a higher memory allocation.

2000-09-15, Fri (Day 237, temperature at 07:28: 27.9°C, difference: +1.8°C): Yesterday I got up about ten minutes early but today I got up a full half hour early (06:30) due to this beeping sound somewhere around John’s bed. It turned out that the fire alarm in Jesse and Tom’s room went off but the building alarm didn’t go off. I didn’t know these alarms could ring independently. We eventually got the alarm reset and it stopped beeping.

I found out through being told and recollection that there was quite a thunderstorm last night and the power went out three times. I didn’t notice the power outage when I got up since the UPS kept the computer on. I got up in the middle of the night, took the fan out of the window, and shut the window since rain was blowing in.

Since I didn’t have any work immediately due and I really needed to back up my computer, I spent the afternoon and the rest of the day doing that. After dinner, Jesse, Tom, and I checked out “2001: A Space Odyssey” from McCabe and watched it in the lounge. I thought the movie was very confusing in terms of overall plot, although Tom was able to explain things afterwards since he read the book. I grappled up a pillar in the lounge to show my strength and then I continued prepping for backup.

I only needed 12 Zip disks to back up even though there was 1.75 GB of data, which is compressed on the Zip disks. The next major step was to install TechTool Pro 3. The optimization tool has a bad bug in it where it looped endlessly (I ran it overnight) by moving a block of data and free space back and forth to no end.

2000-09-14, Thu (Day 236, temperature at 07:05: 26.1°C, difference: -3.0°C [partly due to my running the fan before going to bed last night]): Compared to Tuesday I was much better rested and it was easier to pay attention in class. The interesting thing with my classes this semester is I can actually use their arguments in daily conversation while that wasn’t true with engin. Therefore I am more likely to remember the material from the new courses.

I got back from Philosophy and in the time up to psych, I was able to get the entire Phoenix Online issue on the server save any art although I did do the cover images. Doing the entire issue in a little over an hour is a huge time saver. Before Phoenix seemed to take over one or up to four days of my week but right now it only takes up to an hour.

At 16:15, John and I went to a psychology talk given by Kim Wright Cassidy about children’s desires and how others influence them. I went to the publications office a half-hour early since Nathan was showing pictures of his trip to Poland and Bulgaria. The editorial board meeting started at 19:30.

2000-09-13, Wed (Day 235, temperature at 07:17: 29.1°C, difference: +0.7°C): Most of the day was typical until the later evening. I did some stuff to automate parts of assembling The Phoenix Online such as making new folders for the issue and a file creator changer for the web output. The study break at 22:00 was the building of gingerbread houses out of graham crackers. The variance of design was tremendous, where some people just put stuff together, others were more traditional, some were creative, and a few were extravagant. I was in the first group of just putting stuff together since by this time of the day (and I was in the middle of writing the “make folders” AppleScript) my brain was winding down and I didn’t want to think too much.

2000-09-12, Tue (Day 234, temperature at 07:16: 28.4°C, difference: +0.5°C): The sleepiness started to affect my attention level in class especially for Philosophy, so today at least until dinner was difficult. I went to the career planning and placement office for the first time finally and signed up for a personality test next week.

2000-09-11, Mon (Day 233, temperature at 07:28: 27.9°C, difference: +0.9°C): I dreamed in was in the car with at least Dad and we were driving by Ridley High School north from MacDade Blvd. The outdoor bulletin board by the horseshoe entrance said that construction for the new high school has been delayed and to check the web site for updates. Dad told me it was due to something with Radnor. The front of the building still looked like the now torn down Ridley Community Center while at the same time the back of the site had the new building. The site was also cleaned up to make it look nicer since the construction vehicles were not working right now. In real life the Community Center was completely demolished before the new high school was constructed.

On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, I also go to the gym as well as go for my walk. Today it seemed like I was doing a lot of fast walking this morning. Any walking I did for the rest of the day seemed like nothing. Theatre 4a started meeting again although just Julia and I were there with the prof today. The afternoon was spent unproductively in the library since I was dozing due to sleepiness. Dinner was a mixture of opinions.

2000-09-10, Sun (Day 232, temperature at 07:52: 27.0°C, difference: +1.4°C): Since Sharples doesn’t do breakfast on Sundays I stayed in for the morning and did some reading. I also found out that Rutgers has this automated Mac lab maintenance system that sounds cool and does a lot of stuff.

I had good conversation at lunch with Susan. I did some reading in the afternoon although that went slowly since the sleep deprivation is starting to catch up. I thought about relationships in general and I came to the conclusion when I was walking to dinner that at the lowest level I run things like an economist would where the maximum gain comes from the minimum effort. So for me I would only seriously consider a relationship if it would not lead to spending a lot of effort and getting little out of it.

This evening I worked on taking care of the most critical reminders on my desktop, which I have little time to address. I then went to McCabe for about an hour and then did some quick things on my computer prior going to bed before midnight.

2000-09-09, Sat (Day 231, temperature at 07:14: 25.6°C, difference: +2.2°C): I went to Sharples first to arrive in time for regular breakfast and then I went for my walk, following the path backwards. I did the laundry for the first time this semester and even though I had little time, the process went faster since there is an elevator and there is seven of each type of machine. So as long as no more than three machines are in use, I do all of my three loads in parallel. In Mertz since I wanted to leave a machine free among the three of each type, I had to delay the whites for the next cycle.

The dryers in Willets also work particularly well and even though the laundry room is in the basement, the design and appearance of what is otherwise an industrial-mechanical type room is nice. Having the three water connections for the washing machines go into a small recess in the wall is a nice touch and hiding the large dryer plugs and exhaust pipe behind the dryers also improves the look.

In the afternoon I proofed my Jones Theatre paper which I finished late this morning. The public iMac that I was working on could not find the McCabe public printer on the second level that can print double sided. Since On Guard was enabled I couldn’t add another desktop printer with the right name and since the Mac OS is really picky for certain things, I couldn’t copy an “inactive” desktop printer from my computer to the public area machine, even to the write-enabled User Folder. I printed double sided to PA_PRINT over the summer to test the feature so I did that instead and it worked fine. When I came back to the library from Beardsley, I told the digital services librarian that the printer name the Finder expects is not the actual name of the printer, which is one reason why it couldn’t find the printer.

This printing problem with McCabe is relatively minor though. The library has improved much from the renovations this summer. The building received a new roof, the ventilation system was cleaned and now pumps out a lot of air through previously inactive vents, the second level was completely renovated and the entrance has just a big ramp leading into the building instead of a ramp and stairs. McCabe is now a nice place to study and it seems that somewhat more people frequent the library now. People also seem happier than before when they are in the library.

I saw the movie “Usual Suspects” in DuPont. Even though the schedules say that the first show time this semester is at 19:00, the two movies this weekend really started at 19:30 like last year. That delay has been pissing some people off. There also was a major problem with this production. The screen was completely up and also broken. Since it could not be pulled down manually, the first solution was to set up this miniature screen on the instructor’s lab table. This setup looked amusing although it didn’t work. So instead the movie was shown on the black chalkboard. The movie was darker than normal, but some scenes also looked so bright that there was this glow around the luminescent people.

2000-09-08, Fri (Day 230, temperature at 07:20: 23.4°C, difference: +0.7°C): Around lunch I got a key to the design studio in LPAC for Theatre, deposited my last ITS summer technical support associate check, and went to the bookstore twice. I got things that weren’t books this time. I saw this thin-style three hole punch and even though it looked underpowered I bought it anyway, soon finding out that it had a hard time punching even one sheet of paper let alone five. So I returned it and then went to McCabe to start writing my Theatre paper for Monday.

After dinner, Jesse and I went to LPAC to see “Mission Impossible 2.” The movie was supposed to start at 19:00, a half-hour earlier than normal, but it ended up starting at the regular time anyway. The movie was so unbelievable it was enjoyable.

2000-09-07, Thu (Day 229, temperature at 07:21: 22.7°C, difference: -0.3°C): To do the first issue of The Phoenix Online for this semester, I checked “ Milhouse,” the publications server when I got up this morning but it wasn’t there. I went to my 08:30 Philosophy class thinking that the server would come back soon. After Philosophy, Milhouse still wasn’t there, so I called the student publications coordinator and he got it working before 13:00. In the meantime before psych, I put the section index pages and the in-(section name) includes together but I soon ran out of stuff to do since most of the work was on the server.

I got the copy online in the early afternoon and I spent the rest of the day making minor adjustments. I did a minimum version of the issue this week since the online edition redesign should resume within the next week and I needed to get back to regular work. The Phoenix editorial board meetings this semester are earlier now at 19:30.

After 23:00, I finally got my startup AppleScript to have the same functionality on my iMac as the one I wrote at home for the Power Mac 7300. The newer versions of the Mac OS don’t allow the AppleScript duplicate command to copy invisible files, which is what I do for the “Save reminder folders” script. So instead I reveal the previously invisible “~a” file, copy it, make the copied file invisible through pathname concatenation, and then make the main “~a” file invisible again. The second part was difficult to do since I still don’t know what I am doing in AppleScript.

2000-09-06, Wed (Day 228, temperature at 07:35: 23.0°C, difference: -3.4°C): I started going to the Mullan Tennis Center this morning after breakfast but before when my 09:30 class would be even though I don’t have Theatre for the rest of the week. I turned in my add/drop form to the Registrar this afternoon, making official my move away from engineering and other natural sciences. I changed three credits and also dropped labs and problem sessions. I added Theatre 4a-1, Linguistics 1-1, and Psychology 1. I dropped Engin 11, Engin 11 lab, Engin 11 problem session, Chem 10 lecture, Chem 10 lab, and Math 18. With the changes I am essentially having every afternoon free with the exception of the four psychology attachments that will take place during the semester. I’m getting nearly nine hours of time spent in class back. Already, I have much more time now than before, enough so that I can actually spend time to properly do the readings for class.

At dinner my past lives kept coming up for discussion and I said that besides being in Vietnam I was also in Germany in the period leading up to World War II. This could explain why I started listening to a German radio station recently, “Antenne Mecklenburg-Vorpommern.” I also said I might have been part of the Confederates in the American Civil War and I also was present during the American Revolution.

2000-09-05, Tue (Day 227, temperature at 07:14: 26.4°C, difference: -2.8°C): Now that I am no longer taking engineering classes at 08:30, my Philosophy 08:30 today seemed early and some of the 25 or so class members were remarking on why they were even taking an 08:30. I remembered I choose Philosophy since I wanted to complement the Engin 11 08:30 on MWF but now I’m not taking that class. Psychology 1 turned out to mostly fill Kirby Lecture Hall and I found out from Kiyo later today that it is currently the largest class on campus, passing Bio 1 even though the Class of 2004 had more members state Biology as a potential major than any other.

After lunch I slowly became disoriented and tired but in a new way. I started wandering around to department offices of the courses I dropped to let them know, but all three were closed.

I got the second grouping of my books and by 15:00 I went to the McCabe library, where I am doing my work at now. I fell asleep an hour later. I woke up soon before I was going to leave for dinner.

In the evening Student Budget Committee had a meeting in Kirby explaining why a 19% budget cut was necessary. The two things to support that decision best was that spending over the past eight years was twice that of income growth. As a result the capital replacement fund has been depleted, which is akin to not having any money set aside in case something bad happens.

A Willets PC dorm tech stopped by later tonight to look at John’s computer. While the tech was figuring out what the problem was, it froze at the DOS command line which is good because Windows has nothing to do with the problem but bad since now the problem is hardware and may take longer to fix. So at some point John needs to take his computer to the hardware tech for ITS.

I updated The Phoenix Online template files with the old design on the server so that way the automation can work correctly tomorrow. I changed the startup scripts on my iMac to load as one script and since it is now a linear program, the timeouts don’t occur when every script was trying to do everything at once. However, I have way too much stuff on my hard drive (1.74 G for 27,688 items) so the script still takes at least three minutes to finish. Even though my iMac is faster than the Power Mac 7300 upgraded to a G3 at home, the additional size and number of files counteracts and obscures the speed increase.

2000-09-04, Mon (Day 226, temperature at 07:10: 29.2°C, difference: -0.9°C, Labor Day and classes start): John and I walked to LPAC several minutes before our 09:30 classes to start off our classes for the fall semester. Today I was able to add Theatre 4a, Set Design as well as Linguistics 1. Although there were only four people in Theatre, Linguistics had so many students that people grabbed chairs from elsewhere to bring into the classroom. I found both my classes today to be engaging and interesting.

After lunch I got my books for today’s classes including art supplies for Set Design. Before dinner I put about 20 posters and such on the walls of the room. The “new” NASA posters are this nice dark blue color, cutting down on the wall reflections a lot.

At dinner, the quad (John, Jesse, Tom, and I) talked about many disparate topics in a very intangible sort of way. We then played wiffle ball in our 3d south hallway and later I went to McCabe to study. After getting back before 22:00, Claire had a hall meeting, study break, and game of wink, which I have realized is a rough wrestling game when played on industrial pile carpet.

2000-09-03, Sun (Day 225, temperature at 10:18: 30.1°C, difference: +0.7°C): Even though I went to bed late, I still was awake soon after 07:00 but unable to get up. Instead I got up at 10:00. The Phoenix training sessions were this afternoon in the humid publications office. While back in Willets between the 12:00 meeting and training, I finally got the wasp-like insect out of the room that has been there since I moved in. All along I thought it had flown out but it turns out that it didn’t. John also got a fan to make the circulation in the room better. Around dinner, which was during The Phoenix training sessions, it rained very heavily, so much that I actually waited in Parrish Parlors for it to slow down somewhat before going back to Willets.

At night I unpacked some more boxes and soon after 22:00, John’s computer started messing up at a much more rapid pace. Earlier today the computer started restarting unexpectedly even though there was no Windows scheduled task that said to do so. Tom found out that the changes he made yesterday were erased by the computer’s own wisdom, so Tom ran out of ideas for now. I e-mailed the two PC dorm techs in the hopes that they could fix the problem or identify that John’s computer has a hardware failure and therefore he needs a new system.

2000-09-02, Sat (Day 224, temperature at 07:04: 29.4°C, difference: [N/A] °C): I got up at 07:00 and after finding clothes to wear I went out for a walk and then went to breakfast. In the morning I unpacked more. After I came back from lunch, my roommate John and his family arrived. Tom, my co-roommate also arrived around then as well. I went to a Phoenix meeting in the early afternoon and another in the late afternoon.

I went to dinner and started talking to Kiyo and then after he left I was about to leave when my second co-roommate Jesse came in the state of a whirlwind since he arrived to campus about 20 minutes ago. Tom and Jesse’s Mom sat down and we had a typically unusual conversation.

After dinner we moved stuff from Jesse’s vehicle to Willets and then we went to Mary Lyon to find the rest of Jesse and Tom’s stuff. It seemed that the persistent rains this summer ruined some people’s boxes and Jesse couldn’t find his books. So we brought back what we could.

In the evening, I started playing the Internet stream of a German pop radio station that I found last week at home. I wanted to listen to FM radio but my FM radio reception is really bad possibly because of the configuration of the electric devices in my room. The devices are essentially in one area although not everything is plugged into the same outlet pair.

John got back from the King of Prussia mall and started unpacking. His computer started running into serious problems. The computer froze and then it would freeze during Scandisk. We bypassed that and then when the Windows 98 startup sound began the computer unexpectedly shut down.

Tom eventually got on the computer and found the high memory drivers were missing and he then got them back. After lots of work into the next day, John’s computer was able to startup correctly. I configured the network settings using the ITS documentation supplemented with what I needed to do to get Virtual PC to work on my computer. With those changes the networking stuff got fixed too. Previously IE was trying to determine the proxy settings of which there are none and was stalling at that.

So I didn’t get to bed until after 01:00.

2000-09-01, Fri (Day 223): Welcome back. I worked for Information Technology Services (ITS), formerly known as the Computing Center, over the summer meaning I still saw much of the campus even when classes were not taking place. I returned to Swat for the fall semester at around noon today and started unpacking in Willets 305. The suspense since I was moving into Willets was whether the passenger elevator was working that was installed this summer. I instinctively pushed the button to call the elevator and the button didn’t light up and I didn’t hear any activity in the elevator shaft.

My Dad talked to someone else and he found out that you needed to use your room key to call the elevator. In addition to doing that, you also need to push the button while the key is turned which I still needed to figure out. I would not say this is a very user-friendly elevator. I like the key idea so that way some random person doesn’t show in up the elevator. The problem is unless there were a lot of floors in Willets with a lot of usage, I don’t see why you would also need to tell the elevator what direction you wanted to go in addition to using the key.

I didn’t have a phone in my room, but I called telecom and that was fixed by the end of the day. One of the electrical outlets is broken so I went to the service building and put in a work order for that. I also asked about the connecting door to the adjacent room Willets 309, which has a winter break type red lock on it that I can’t use. I was told a housekeeper could fix that. Claire, my RA, stopped by and I explained what was going on and she was going to work on some of this stuff.

After I moved the large furniture in good spots and put my boxes in one area of the room so people could work in my room, I put my stuff together to change my classes. It finished raining soon before I left Willets so the environment was wet and humid, soon to be hot again. I got some forms from the Registrar, but I had to go back two times after the first time today to get more stuff. I then went to my advisor who was busy at the time so I went to get my mail and I had so much of it that stuff was crumpled up in the mailbox. My box number is one less than my box number from last year.

I returned to Hicks and met my advisor Nelson and talked for almost an hour about classes and registration. My new plan is to stop taking engineering and its support courses and move towards psychology. Nelson said overall my schedule looked good, but he cautioned that psychology is similar to engin in the layering, cumulative knowledge aspect. I said to him that’s why I didn’t like engin, so it is possible I may also not like psychology. We’ll see.

At night I started unpacking the most important stuff so that way I could go to bed and I then went to the student publications office, meeting Justin, Nathan, and Suzanne who were doing the print redesign of The Phoenix newspaper. The server was acting up so I fixed the directory errors with Disk First Aid but there were still problems so I rebuilt the desktop.

I did get in bed before 23:00, but it wasn’t the noise of the dorm that kept me awake but rather it was the humid heat of the room and the loud noise of insects outside. It seemed like I was sleeping outside in the forest and I need to keep an ear and eye open for animals.


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