Journal 2001-02

Current entries

2001-02-28, Wed (Day 361, temperature at 08:01: 28.4°C, difference: -0.1°C): I had two dreams this morning that I’m writing down on Thursday afternoon so it is something that I still remember them yet their meaning explains why. I was in the multipurpose room in my elementary school although it was not an exact match, as it could be any cafeteria. I am sitting at a table and I felt good that a diverse group of people was sitting at this table and this mixing was true for the whole room.

However, this blissful state was damaged by a fight that broke out at the table I first noticed. What made this particular fight particularly damaging was that the fighters picked up their chairs and started throwing them at each other. Since the school lunch configuration didn’t have chairs, the chairs I saw were the Sharples white plastic chairs. This was a big deal for those in the room that the situation was escalating to the throwing of chairs. In fact it was almost frightening in the sense that some sort of intangible respect was being lost.

A riot soon develops and I try to escape the room. I was able to exit with my green book bag but I was unable to grab my white coat, which I just had to leave on the floor near the start of the fight. Someone else was with me that I left with although I don’t know the exact identity. I get to the main stairs that lead downstairs to the library and Kindergarten classrooms and then this dream interrupts.

In my next dream now I am excited since The Phoenix Online was getting bursts of visitors. There would be a brief lull and then about 60 to 80 requests would be made, which would be handled relatively quickly and then another burst would occur.

Chinese Civilization had good professor to student lecture connection and there was a good amount of discussion in mythology.

I needed to reboot the publications server after the first Phoenix deadline so I didn’t finish by 17:30 to go to Third Wing in Sharples when they started. I stayed in the office to eat the pizza for dinner. I went back to Willets to eat some more and then went back to the office.

The Power Mac 7300 in the publications office seemed to had “lost” its hard drive again. The most recent time this problem happened was early December last year. The hard drive got itself back today like it did earlier although TechTool didn’t like the catalog file on the drive and in protest it would make this continual disk access in an infinite loop while doing a catalog file scan. I rebuilt the directory although that didn’t fix the problem. I was in company with Matt after he returned from the women’s basketball game as he was writing his article about the game.

Doing the art for the online edition took an extra hour because I was slow and I didn’t get to bed until 04:00.

2001-02-27, Tue (Day 360, temperature at 08:01: 28.5°C, difference: -0.2°C): After Kako’s class I made the revisions to my Chinese Civilization paper. It seemed like I had plenty of time when I started, but I soon became very rushed since I wanted to finish by 17:00. Exasperating the problem was the non-functionality of the level two printer in McCabe. A part is on backorder as this printer has been broken for about ten days now. So I needed to print to Beardsley.

2001-02-26, Mon (Day 359, temperature at 08:15: 28.7°C, difference: +0.4°C): Classes today were more interesting. I read e-mail this evening, just a day’s worth, and then went to the SWIL movie at 22:00. I saw “Dead Again” before in Bruno’s science fiction class during my senior year of high school. However, I didn’t recognize that I was watching that movie tonight until the opening played. Once I heard the soundtrack and saw the headlines going by, I was enthused that I was seeing this good complicated movie. The movie seemed scarier this time around since I wasn’t sitting across the classroom looking at a 27" TV in high school but rather I was sitting reasonably close to a projection screen in Kirby.

2001-02-25, Sun (Day 358, temperature at 11:41: 28.3°C, difference: +0.4°C): I dreamed that I was in a room where I lived and I also had Milhouse the student publications server with me. I didn’t have the actual hardware (Sony 15" Monitor and Apple G4), but I did have the data and the functionality. Apparently I was tending for it for an interim time period. I didn’t have a continuous connection to the Internet and I was off campus so I had to dial-in to the campus network. The SupraExpress modem was off hook continuously and while I think the connection was idling for a bit, which leads to an idle disconnection, the modem reconnected again anyway. I was very busy and I didn’t have enough time to configure the server properly to work from here.

Also in my dream, the LetterRip application that sends the Daily Gazette out wasn’t running and I was trying to find the item in the Startup Items folder so I could open the application manually. LetterRip doesn’t open automatically at startup even though it should. I was running against time because Jeff was going to send the Gazette out soon and I didn’t have the application open yet. However I kept getting interrupted. In the room were other Macintoshes that were connected to the network, so that way I could test features. I realized near the end that I only had the Phoenix data so I was missing all of the other volumes on the server.

I got up and stayed up kind of late today, as I seem to be more tired recently. I read e-mail today. I ate the shrimp from Ocean City, Maryland that Dad gave to me about a week ago, which still tasted good.

2001-02-24, Sat (Day 357, temperature at 08:01: 27.9°C, difference: -0.7°C): The laundry room was used more than normal this morning, but it was not too much of a hindrance. I read e-mail for the remainder of the day. I dozed off at around 14:00 until my family came by to drop a bag of stuff off. I also got tired after 18:00 and laid down, waking up at 21:00. I went to bed at around 01:00.

2001-02-23, Fri (Day 356, temperature at 08:01: 28.6°C, difference: +4.8°C): Allen had a meeting in the nice third floor seminar room in Papazian about sophomore papers. Papazian 319 is a heavy Saturn energy (3 + 1 + 9 = 13, 1 + 3 = 4, 4 = heavy Saturn), but it is appropriate and the room felt good. I had a WA meeting in Kohlberg Coffee Bar about my first essay for Chinese history. My WA made helpful comments about my paper.

At lunch, John and Tom got a serious idea to live in Mary Lyon next year. I think it is good for them, but it would do no good for me since I do stuff on campus while they are trying to get away from it. At dinner, I hashed out an area of the United States of where I want to live after Swat. I don’t like the cold anymore and I want to go south and west. I started at Arizona, drew over to New Mexico, up to Kansas and Missouri, down to Texas and back again.

I have been drinking twice the amount of water at meals since I have been sick to ease recovery. At breakfast the third glass is orange juice.

Jesse and I went to see “Reservoir Dogs” in Kirby since the film distributor messed up the Movie Committee so they had to get the tape. Unlike the showing of “The Day the Earth Stood Still” last Monday, the video heads did not get dirty to cause a full-screen display to pop up tonight asking for the heads to be cleaned. The video head message on Monday must have been the tape that was giving the problems and not the VCR. I found “Reservoir Dogs” to be very disturbing but Jesse liked it.

I continued reading mail, but I fell asleep at 22:30 even though the music was playing and the window was open. So I went to bed.

2001-02-22, Thu (Day 355, temperature at 08:16: 23.8°C, difference: -2.5°C): I intentionally didn’t go for my walk today because I wanted to limit the amount of energy I expend in a day so that way I wouldn’t get sick a third time.

It started snowing before 13:00 and the accumulation was quick, up to a few inches by the late evening.

Kako’s class was full of references to last class, which had a designated discussion. The current discussion and lecture today intrigued me.

I spent the rest of the free time today catching up the journal since I haven’t written in it since Monday. The Phoenix meeting had three section editors there, which was good for this semester but it just seemed sparse, partially due to the snow although that is a lame excuse.

After the meeting I went to Jesse and Tom’s room to hang out, although a discussion was opened on how to make next year better. I said I had nothing real to offer, but I found that sometimes if I just realize that there is a problem, by identifying it as such it fixes itself.

2001-02-21, Wed (Day 354, temperature at 08:01: 26.3°C, difference: +0.1°C): I felt better as the day progressed. However, there was the concern that since I needed to stay up late tonight to do art for The Phoenix online edition, I would get sick again. It seems like this turned out not to be the case.

When I was using the Send to Web script today, I encountered a problem with two stories, one in the opinions section and the other in the sports section. Both of the pieces were columns. PageMaker refused to export them giving some almost random error. I was able to remedy the one in sports by copying the article to another text box, but the opinions piece didn’t fix like that and instead I had to export the story to HTML manually in Word.

I didn’t go to Third Wing because I ran minutes behind from the previous problem, the pizza came to the office, and it was a staff member’s birthday. I briefly stopped by my room since it was after dinner and then went back to the office for the evening. I didn’t go to bed terribly late, but I really had to rush to finish the online stuff before 02:00.

2001-02-20, Tue (Day 353, temperature at 08:02: 26.2°C, difference: +2.2°C): I went for my walk this morning with a stuffy nose. Normally this condition isn’t a problem, but the crows in the area were very vocal and that usually means I am going to run into some sort of trouble during the day. They were very noisy so apparently it must be really bad and it was.

John was writing a paper today. I told Jesse in Allen’s class that today seems like that single day out of a year where my sinuses mess up severely and then fix themselves within the day. Unfortunately I didn’t have more than one tissue on me and I was sort of boxed in with the DuPont 161 seating so getting through the class seemed like an ordeal.

I anticipated earlier that I would spend half the time after lunch and before Kako’s class doing the reading and the other half of the time reading e-mail. Instead I did neither and laid down. I lost my sense of time and woke up at 13:17 since I thought John was going to class and his prepping would have been my cue. I was going to go to class but I felt worse so I just went back to bed. My parents called to drop stuff off, which woke me up closer to 17:00 for dinner.

I still read e-mail in the evening but the rate was pitiful and my fever was flaring up so I needed to open the window. I also went up to the student publications office later this evening until 23:00. The PPC Registration Database is the one file that is causing most of the computer problems in the office since the file grows very quickly now.

2001-02-19, Mon (Day 352, temperature at 07:19: 24.0°C [window open], difference: +0.4°C): I got up before my alarm and I was awake but still in bed at 07:00 when the sun was getting up. This way of waking up is from the result of going to bed at a reasonable time and sleeping well, at least until I would say an hour or two before 07:00.

I fell into that do too much after getting well and then getting sick again trap today. I got the idea at lunch to take a trip to the Springfield Mall. Tom suggested that I ask Jesse to go as well, which I did. We went to the mall on President’s Day, much not to my knowledge so I didn’t understand at first why the mall was so crowded.

Jesse and I saw clearly how overpriced CDs are at the mall, my explanation that CD stores there have to pay the higher mall rent. I knew about this price difference beforehand without actually walking into this store to see it firsthand, but what won out today was convenience since Best Buy is further down Baltimore Pike. I usually get my CDs from Best Buy since their prices are fairly good.

After getting just one CD (Medeski, Martin, and Wood) from The Wall since the prices were approaching $19, Jesse and I went to Waldenbooks. I anticipated buying a book as well, but I found the selection lacking depth although the breadth was good. The New Age section had many good titles, but none good enough for me to buy. Nobody was at the section when I came to it but as Jesse and I reviewed titles, a few people stopped by and forced their way in to the two-panel section that Jesse and I were squarely standing in front of to look at titles.

Of course the Springfield Mall is not the way that I remember it when I was a kid. Now the mall seems like it is trying to be like King of Prussia. A while ago I was thinking about how before the Granite Run Mall was renovated a few years ago it had these door handles made of wood or like substance that had the Granite Run logo painted on it. It looked so nice and now it’s not there anymore. I miss that nice touch.

So Jesse and I felt a little disappointed upon leaving the mall although for different reasons. I get back at 15:00 and start doing the laundry, which I normally would have done on Saturday morning except I got sick then. The last washer did something weird with my clothes by not spin drying them and it left two inches of water at the bottom of the tub. As a result my whites never completely dried although that damp feeling when I put on my nightshirts and socks didn’t feel too bad when I got my fever tomorrow.

I read mail in the evening and went to Kirby at 22:00 for “The Day the Earth Stood Still.”

2001-02-18, Sun (Day 351, temperature at 13:14: 23.6°C [window open], difference: -3.4°C): Today was much better. I completed my history paper before 22:00, I got up at a reasonable time, and was able to think more about what happened over the past two days. I took a shower when I got up although I haven’t taken a shower in the morning in a while. I then ate breakfast and then lunch. I spent the afternoon trying to write the paper in my room. I managed to get about 40% of it done but the rate was pretty bad. I went to McCabe after dinner and was able to work a little better although I had many conflicting things preventing me from writing anything. I could write about examples, but that would mean not focusing on the texts. If I focused on the texts I didn’t have much to write about and still stay on topic.

My working environment was also different. The six iMacs by the old Honors Reserve area on the fourth level was reduced to two over break although the third computer looks like it is out for repairs. I wanted an area that had more computers in a group so it would seem more social. I went to the main level to work although that has a bunch of difficulties. First the lighting is bad for computer work. There is much commotion, it is right by the entryway, and you are sitting next to people where I prefer being across from someone when working non-collaboratively. People around me were making reference to “downstairs” so maybe that’s where the computers are.

Also to make this paper even harder to finish, all these printers are breaking on campus. The second level printer in McCabe was broken as well as the fourth level printer. So I needed to print to Beardsley. I went to Beardsley to pick up my paper and one of the two printers there wasn’t working either. So this campus seems to be mired in mechanical failures again like on 2000-11-18, only the problems are more technically oriented this time.

2001-02-17, Sat (Day 350, temperature at 15:08: 27.0°C [window opened], difference: -0.3°C): I did get up at 08:00 but went right back to bed because I felt tired. However, I soon developed a flu-like illness that made getting out of bed extremely difficult. I did finally get up at 14:48 although I didn’t feel like doing anything but I still had that paper to do as well as the wash, and many other things. However, even the routine stuff seemed impossible to do right now. I did go to dinner although I didn’t put much on my plate and ate even less of that. I also didn’t go out tonight either and I just went back to bed after dinner. The rest of the day seems like a complete blank to me.

2001-02-16, Fri (Day 349, temperature at 08:02: 27.3°C, difference: -0.1°C): I dreamed I was with someone else on the third floor of a Ridley Middle School classroom on the south side of the main wing. I leave to go to the stairs that go to the cafeteria (west end). I almost fall down the stairs that go from the first level to the cafeteria level since the stairs start right away instead of having more of a landing.

We get outside to the football field, which is where an elementary school is being built. Right now there is this strange foundation, a square stone pattern that looked like this drawing to the right. This pattern looks similar to what is on the patio of McCabe although the pattern there is more complicated.

Pattern seen in my dream.

The trouble started in the afternoon. I went to McCabe to work on my paper for Chinese history due Monday, but reached a point where I couldn’t work very well and felt like taking a nap. I exit the library and find two Swarthmore fire trucks in the Parrish east circle, two Public Safety vehicles, and further down the way a Swarthmore police car. The firefighters were adjusting an exhaust fan to blow smoke out of the Parrish building. I later learned from next week’s Phoenix article that there was a grease fire in the kitchen in the east end of the building on the second floor. Fortunately the Parrish fire was put out quickly as this could have been much worse of an incident.

The evening was heavily filled. I went to the Fist and Heel performance, then the showing of “The Philadelphia Story” in DuPont and then the Krafftwerk party in Upper Tarble. I felt sort of tired early this evening before I went out. I felt slightly off but still fine during the movie, but during the party I didn’t feel like dancing that much. I eventually started dancing, but I lost interest. So I left. I didn’t feel that bad. This was hardly the case the next day.

2001-02-15, Thu (Day 348, temperature at 08:01: 27.4°C, difference: -0.5°C): I had a hard time getting started this morning. John got in at around 09:30 and that woke me up so I got going from there.

I’m trying to remember what I did between lunch and Kako’s class and I can’t recall even though it happened less than 24 hours ago. I think this is the sort of problem that is present now where I have this unaccounted for time.

I took a nap after Kako’s class. John left for Nashville while I was asleep and will return Monday night. Tom pounded on my door at 17:00 waking me up to go to dinner.

The Phoenix Ed board meeting tonight was sparsely attended. After the meeting I did a slide show of the boys’ lacrosse clinic and then fixed the text size problem with The Phoenix Online. It seems that the default in Windows IE is to have the Text Size as ‘Smaller’ instead of ‘Medium’. So I need to make a style sheet just for that browser, although it is the most commonly used browser. Since I recall Netscape on Linux having a problem with this too, I assigned Linux to the Windows IE stylesheet as well. I don’t have Linux installed on the iMac yet since I am waiting for the OS 9.1 CD to come in the mail. I just have to hope for now that I fixed the text size problem on Linux.

2001-02-14, Wed (Day 347, temperature at 08:02: 27.9°C, difference: +0.2°C, Valentine’s Day): I got the text of The Phoenix online edition up before 23:30 and then worked on the images, finishing by 03:00. I didn’t get to bed until 04:00. John was in Philly for his Orchestra 2001 concert and he stayed overnight. I expected to take about two hours to do the art, but it took about three hours. I think this delay happened because I was tired and also I was playing MP3s instead of listening to the Antenne Mecklenburg-Vorpommern Internet stream, so maybe the former is more intensive processor-wise.

2001-02-13, Tue (Day 346, temperature at [N/A]: [N/A]°C, difference: [N/A]°C): I don’t have a temperature reading for today — the network thing screwed me up even though the information is right on my desk. I get up at 08:00 and find that there are no network services: no web and no AppleTalk zones so I could only see devices in Willets. Bob Velez from ITS sent an e-mail yesterday that there would be a short network outage between 07:30 and 08:00.

I went to the bathroom thinking ITS was just finishing things up and when I got back things still were not working. I went for my walk and breakfast, getting back and expecting things to be working. That was not the case. Don Osborne left a voicemail at 08:30 saying they were having some problems but things should be working soon. I went to Allen’s class and then to lunch, got back and things were sort of working as explained by Don’s message left at 11:45. Most zones he said should be up within an hour.

However, that was too true. I could not see Wharton, Dana, or Hallowell, nor Lamb Miller or Mary Lyon. Lamb Miller came up at around 13:00, but at one point earlier I lost all remote zones and noticed that the machine listing for Willets was longer when I could see just my subnet than when more zones were available. I still had no Internet access and I also could not ping to anyone including myself. After things were restored, I have noticed that this inability to ping is still true on Thursday afternoon.

I went to Kako’s class and after that went to the publications office to get PageMaker to work on Moe. Dee opened the office for me and she told me that her network wasn’t working at all (she has a Windows PC) even though she lives in Parrish, the main building on campus. The machines in the publications office could connect to a hostname but not IP addresses in a web browser. The working zone list was also in flux. I could not see McCabe or anything else down that side of the hill. I also couldn’t see Wharton, Dana or Hallowell, and Sharples and everything beyond there was unavailable.

Don left another voicemail broadcast message sometime between 13:00 and 15:00 saying that some zones were working and they were working to get more of them up. Each message he left during the day was getting progressively worse in terms of his tone of voice.

The G4 still would not open PageMaker even after updating the disk driver and doing a clean reinstall of the system software. So now I had to go through the arduous task of backing up the data, reformatting the drive, and reconfiguring the computer either by starting fresh or merging the existing data.

Of the nine total hours that it took to fix the problem, about four of them were spent transferring the data. I turned the folders on the hard drive into Disk Copy disk images and transferred them over the network (not a good day to do it either) to Nelson, which had enough room to hold the data. I reformatted the drive after 20:00, zeroing all data, which made the initialization step take about an hour. I reinstalled a clean copy of the system and PageMaker finally worked. I put the old system folder back and that worked too. I then put the rest of the data back and tested the computer and that worked fine. So there was something on the hard drive that I didn’t copy that prevented PageMaker from working.

The network was working at a better level after 17:00. Mark Dumic sent an e-mail that said the main campus switch failed during the “routine” software upgrade. They didn’t have a spare Gigabit Ethernet card for the switch so they had to reroute traffic around the failure. Doing this was a challenge, which it why the outage was for so long. In addition, some campus buildings including Lodges and Worth were going to be without network access until tomorrow since a replacement card would not arrive until then. However, the public areas were working and were open until 02:00.

I didn’t get back to Willets until after 01:00 and felt very tired by then.

2001-02-12, Mon (Day 345, temperature at 08:01: 27.7°C, difference: +0.4°C): Lillian seemed to be hitting on some really good points during Chinese Civilization lecture today.

At lunch I came up with the idea of a roller coaster that would traverse the Swarthmore College campus. Drew joined in on the idea as well. After lunch I did some preliminary drawings that would have it start at the base of Parrish beach with the initial rise going over the roof of Parrish and between LPAC and Kohlberg. The route would then go though the north commons, loop around Beardsley, go between Beardsley and Hicks and then Trotter, loop around the Abracadabra sculpture on the Trotter lawn, and then swing around the Rose Garden on the far side from Parrish. The coaster picks up speed going down the hill between Willets and McCabe to have another significant rise as it goes behind Old Tarble, in front of the Worth Health Center and by Mertz, near my room from last year. The coaster then tunnels under Magill Walk to complete the circuit.

I got Yahoo e-mail caught up today and then went to “Porco Rosso” in Kirby.

2001-02-11, Sun (Day 344, temperature at 10:00: 27.3°C, difference: -0.1°C): I went to bed near 04:00, so I got up at 10:00. I was still hungry so I ate breakfast in my room in addition to going to Sharples for brunch, which I ate quickly. I then placed the rest of the Phoenix images on the site. I was wondering when the time saved from the script will positively offset the time it took me to write the script. After doing three weeks of issues, it looks like I have already broken even. It took about six hours to write insert image and with that it only takes two hours to do art for an issue. Before it took at least four. I made a slide show of the Monday snow and then went to the Orchestra 2001 concert at 19:30 in Lang Concert Hall with Jesse and Tom. John was performing in the concert.

I checked the 2001-02-01 issue of The Phoenix and then wrote an e-mail to various Phoenix people and Nathan about the image stuff I did for The Phoenix Online this weekend.

2001-02-10, Sat (Day 343, temperature at 08:01: 27.4°C, difference: -0.4°C): A quiet Saturday morning walk started the day. This afternoon I wrote an AppleScript for The Phoenix Online that inserts the HTML into an article for displaying a picture. The script also uploads the image and calls the upload script for the article, which displays the page in the web browser with the new art addition. If there is a full-sized image for the article, the script makes the include that links to the popup window for the large image and it also makes the popup window HTML, filling in information from the dialog and merging it with a template.

Doing multiple images for an article requires that the first images be moved out of the images folder before running the script to do the second images. The way that the popups are named also limits one popup per article. Also, the script takes progressively longer to run as more pictures are added to the images folder since the script needs to search through the folder until it finds two images for the article or if there is just one it needs to check all of the images.

The Medeski Martin and Wood concert was tonight in LPAC. Jesse, John, and Tom were unsettled that I was going by myself, but I said I had no problem with it. People at the concert seemed unsettled that I was sitting by myself at first until two groups of three sat on each side of me. I did enjoy myself though. It was nice to hear refreshing live music that I haven’t heard before.

After the concert I started adding images to the first issue of The Phoenix this semester.

2001-02-09, Fri (Day 342, temperature at 08:01: 27.8°C, difference: +0.1°C): The way this semester is going, it always seems like I am behind and I cannot consistently do much of anything. When I do focus on something, I only have so much time to do most of it and then I need to move to the next thing. I’m writing this entry on Monday morning.

History class had a discussion today and I knew a few more people through that. Classics class was a dichotomy. The prof at the end commented on how the class dynamics were very good and much better than last Friday, when a lot of people were tired. However, I sat alone in one corner of the room. The afternoon was unsettled and my cough continued.

I updated the make slide show script this afternoon to also do Phoenix Online pages. AOL FTP is still acting badly. At night I went to two movies, the first in Kirby, “Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker,” and the second in LPAC Cinema, “The Original Kings of Comedy.” I went with John for the second movie, which was very funny.

2001-02-08, Thu (Day 341, temperature at 09:00: 27.7°C, difference: +0.2°C): I was out of it for most of the day, waking up at 08:00 but not fully awaking until 09:00 after resetting my alarm. Fortunately I already got the site up, so I didn’t have much extra to do this morning. I took a nap after Kako’s class. I expected to get up at 16:00 when John got back from class or before dinner, but instead I woke up close to 18:00. However, I didn’t know what time it was when I got up and for some reason I thought it was early in the morning the next day, before sunrise. I thought I slept through The Phoenix Ed board meeting and the rest of the evening. I was relieved when I found out what the actual time was. I went to dinner, which was not very good, and even though I found a seat in the small room, I needed to share my four-seat table.

I got back to the room and very soon needed to go to the Phoenix meeting. I went to McCabe afterwards to do reading for class tomorrow.

2001-02-07, Wed (Day 340, temperature at 08:01: 27.5°C, difference: -0.1°C): I was delayed at lunch and afterwards but I did go to the office soon after 14:00. I left after 16:20 for the theatre sophomore paper meeting and returned to the office briefly to do the web stuff for the living section before going to Third Wing at 17:20. There were some problems with seating as this session was well attended with 14 members.

I got back from the office for the night before 23:00 and put tomorrow’s Phoenix issue on the site before the print edition will be published and before 24:00 today.

2001-02-06, Tue (Day 339, temperature at 08:01: 27.6°C, difference: -0.3°C): Until about midday, the paths on campus were covered in a layer of snow that was soon becoming ice. This made walking around a slow thing to do. By sunset the paths were completely clear.

I took a nap in the late afternoon and my dinner consisted of two entrees, a rare thing both for the double main course served by Sharples and for me having it at dinner. I told John later that this probably means I am going to stay up later today. And I did. I spent most of the evening writing an AppleScript module that guesses The Phoenix publication date and allows this value to be changed for make folders and base href expand. There were no major problems getting this component to work, although to do it right, I needed to do a fair amount of testing and I also had to rewrite make folders since the earlier parts had too many hard coded paths and things also could be streamlined.

I got up to the publications office sometime around 23:00. Only Justin, Su, and Liz were there at first. Dee, Jessica, and Ted showed up later but not all at once. The near left G4, Moe, refused to open PageMaker and I went through many things to try and fix the problem but in the end could not get it to work. I e-mailed Jeff, the student publications coordinator, about the problem. As a result I was the last to leave. I got back to my dorm around 03:00 and didn’t go to bed until about 04:00.

I have noticed that over the past few days, I have been going to bed right when the waxing moon is at a certain point in the sky so that it shines in the window and lands right on my pillow. Consequently I have to sleep close to the wall since I don’t want moonlight shining in my face while I am trying to fall asleep. The moon sets about an hour later each night, so it seems that my internal clock is attuned to moon time. I don’t want to be falling asleep when the moon is shining into my room, but I managed to do this consecutively for the past few days. The full moon is Thursday morning. This discovery may explain why I encounter difficulty when the moon is between new and the first quarter. During this period the moon is setting in the late afternoon to the late evening and it seems like I get tired a couple of hours before moonsets. As a result I want to sleep during the day.

2001-02-05, Mon (Day 338, temperature at 08:06: 27.9°C, difference: +0.5°C): I dreamed I was riding different types of elevators. I also take the stairs down while someone is taking the elevator to the same place. At the college bookstore I buy $122 worth of stuff, but my debit account will not pay for it even though it has enough money. One of the workers was questioning a fellow coworker on why debit accounts won’t work in this case although the rationale was not given. I’m going to bring a check later and I think I was able to leave with the merchandise. However, later the bookstore does something bad service-wise and I make the internal decision to defer payment longer. I am in the expanded Ridley Park business district with a layout like Swarthmore’s business district.

Even though it was raining this morning and the general weather forecast for today was more of the same and the high temperature for the next ten days should be 40°F (4.4°C) or above, by Chinese Civilization, it started to snow. The flakes were humongous and when they are of that type, usually that means the snow will soon change to a mix or rain. However this didn’t happen and the snow continued until dinnertime, accumulating on everything since wet snow sticks to lampposts, trees, and building roofs, as well as the ground.

I took a nap in the late afternoon and it was the best nap I had in a while. My dream was really good although there was one anomaly. I see this path on campus that is on a hill and is defined visually by the lampposts in a line that also has other lines connecting along the path. I am presented with a photo album of a scene, which has the anomaly.

I wake up from my nap at 17:20 and go to dinner late. John is already back and I run into Jesse returning along the way. I then remember the anomaly in my dream, triggered when I look up the path by McCabe towards Parrish. I shrug it off since I don’t have much of a basis for it. I eventually eat with Kai and Jeremy. Jeremy and I went to Pearson for the education sophomore paper meeting at 18:30. While walking around the campus, the sights were just incredible. It reminded me of a Christmastime scene although Jeremy quipped that it was a month late.

The education meeting was the only sophomore paper meeting that I have been to so far that actually was a true discussion instead of a lecture. The dialogue in the Education Materials Center reminded me best of how Swarthmore should be.

I got back and decided to take care of Phoenix things. However after rerunning letters to the editor for the Jan. 25 issue through the server, I realized I didn’t have a way to automatically postprocess the proper date since today is not Jan. 25. Before I could add a date choosing feature to the base href expand and make folders scripts I felt that I needed to fix the problem with the check for include script first. Parsing an include times out when running it from the upload script. It turned out that the dialog that asks if you really want to parse the include was giving problems. Any dialog seemed to do it and using Dialog Director to display the dialog gave the same problem. So I just had to remove the confirmation. I cleaned up the mess made by debugging and placed copies of the final scripts I have written on Milhouse.

In between the scripting I went to see “Groundhog Day” in Kirby.

2001-02-04, Sun (Day 337, temperature at 08:01: 27.4°C, difference: -0.1°C): I get off to a slow start today because the sickness and tiredness is starting to get in the way of my day to day activities. I got caught up on e-mail.

2001-02-03, Sat (Day 336, temperature at 07:03: 27.5°C, difference: -0.3°C): I got up at 07:00 so I would have enough time to go for my walk and eat breakfast before the Delco McCabe achievement award interviews, but I couldn’t stay awake. I reset my alarm back to 08:00 and went back to bed. For some reason I got up at 07:24 and realized what time it was so I went back to bed again, waking up at 08:00.

This year there were only seven Delco finalists. Upon returning to Willets I called home so Dad could pick me up. I returned to the campus soon after 17:00 and started doing the wash and then went to dinner.

I went to the faculty dance concert in LPAC at 20:00 and that ended right at 22:00 so I went right to the movie “On the Waterfront,” which was in Kirby since there was a delivery problem with the projection reels so the video was shown instead.

2001-02-02, Fri (Day 335, temperature at 08:01: 27.8°C, difference: -0.2°C): I took an extended nap this afternoon to try and recover my lost sleep. For dinner I went to the Whittier House, which is adjacent to the Friends Meetinghouse for a Chinese dinner. There were about 60 people there and after the dinner Chinese language students put on skits. I stayed to clean up and had enough time to go back to Willets before the second showing of “Double Indemnity” in DuPont. This movie from 1944 was very well done.

2001-02-01, Thu (Day 334, temperature at 08:01: 28.0°C, difference: +0.2°C): Due to my different morning schedule this semester, The Phoenix Online goes up later than last semester because I don’t have at least a 35 minute block of time until after lunch. I am thinking of putting the site up before I go to bed Wednesday night although I would have to wait until Thursday after 00:00 for the date produced by the post processing scripts to be correct. I could also change the make folders and bhref expand scripts to see if it’s a Thursday and if it isn’t to ask what the issue date should be.

I got the site up before Kako’s class. After the class I went to McCabe and took a nap. I woke up unaware of what the time was since I am still not wearing a watch during the day. I wanted to finish the Chinese Civilization map assignment before 17:00 and I completed it 15 minutes early. I checked the time on a public area computer since the clocks in McCabe are not very reliable.

After The Phoenix editorial board meeting tonight I fixed the scripts in PageMaker on the near left G4 in the publications office. I think trashing the PPC Registration Database fixed the problem, although the file size was around 288 K, which is about the size of the file on my iMac, so by that logic I may be having problems too.

I went to McCabe and did reading for mythology until closing.

Journal 2001-01