Journal 2001-10
2001-10-31, Wed (Day 493, temperature at 07:31: 26.3°C, difference: -0.5°C, Halloween and a full moon): I had class in the morning and in the early afternoon I took a nap. I worked faster and felt better for the rest of the day due to feeling more rested. I went up to the student publications office after 16:30. The temporary server on Troy McClure was working fine but I found out Phoenix page 13, the lead living page, did not export to EPS properly and it was not a color page. The problem was with the art on the page. Normally we don’t export to EPS the non-color pages but considering what happened last week with the lead living page failing to export I didn’t want the mistake to repeat itself. The living page for that week was in color so it was exported to EPS but it was done as Dan left with the pages.
I finished the first export of the pages to XML before 18:00, which I haven’t done recently if at all with the new system of Quark and XML. However, the pizza did not arrive yet and it was too late to go to Third Wing since it already started and Jesse, John, and Tom probably already left Sharples. So I waited thinking the food would come in a few minutes. Ivan later told me the pizza came at 19:00, a half-hour after I left since I didn’t feel like waiting any longer. Liz called Renato Pizza soon after 18:00 to check on the status on our order. They were swamped and hadn’t even started our order yet.
I went up to the office for the second deadline after 21:30 and the pages were just completed so I finished the second export to XML before 22:30. I also tried making a PDF of a Word test document to see what Word documents AppleWorks can open at home. I discovered that I couldn’t make a PDF on my computer and I didn’t have enough disk space to install the keyed version of Acrobat so I tried making a PDF in the office.
First, I enabled the Adobe PDF writer Chooser extension but that messed up the text orientation of the pictures. Nathan told me the PDF writer extension is not that good and explained to me that even though I had been saving PostScript files with the LaserWriter printer driver, when I opened them in Photoshop, they were interpreted as an EPS. An EPS can only be a single page, which explained why I only saw the first page of the PostScript file in Photoshop. He suggested distilling the PostScript. I ran it through the server and that worked. Nathan and I didn’t hang around like we have been doing after the second deadline and we left when Dee did.
I got the art done by 03:00, chilled for an hour, and went to bed soon after 04:00.
2001-10-30, Tue (Day 492, temperature at 07:31: 26.8°C, difference: +2.1°C): Stat class was not well attended. I chalked it up to post-midterm hangover. In psych of language we broke into small groups, which we haven’t done in a while. After research design I completed the problems for Math 6c. Following dinner I got my journal caught up as well as catching other things up. On the computer I took care of some reminder folders, cleaned up the top-level file organization, and removed MacPerl and Napster.
The MacPerl folder only had about a thousand items in it but it was heavily broken up with nested folders. According to the first big run of the file comment saving AppleScript, the MacPerl folder had about 60 branch stems to nested folders and took about 13 minutes to go through. The run early next morning saved that time length and finished in less than three hours.
There was a Phoenix mini-ed board meeting at 21:30 that lasted about an hour, longer than the full meeting last Thursday but it was enjoyable.
2001-10-29, Mon (Day 491, temperature at 07:31: 24.7°C, difference: -1.1°C): I didn’t feel very tired today considering how little I slept but I felt it when I was taking my stat midterm this evening. Part of the reason why I didn’t feel tired this morning was due to my morning being full of stuff. I left for breakfast around 07:50, went to poly sci, then Math 6c, and MedX. Following MedX I went to lunch and following that the bookstore. Math 6c is multivariable calculus under the Math 6 structure. Math 18 is the full multivariable calculus course. DuPont looks even worse since the construction is going on, as building maintenance is not as vigilant due to the pending full renovation.
The DuPont classrooms facing the north courtyard now have this opaque wall for most of the window height to shield the sight of the construction and probably also reduce the risk of an errant construction vehicle crashing into a window and causing injuries in the classroom. Now DuPont 139 reminds me of the basement of DuPont when I worked there in the summer of 1998. However, DuPont 139 seems worse because it really isn’t the basement and the light fixtures are very yellow. Also, there was an air conditioner in the basement that was on a cold setting due to the liquid sodium in the room. In room 139 two air units were added due to the lack of windows but I don’t think the units are on.
In the afternoon I took a shower though I didn’t smell that bad before I took my shower today.
I then typed up my note sheet for the stat midterm tonight. I typed this in the McCabe cluster by the printers. I also printed out electronic notes for the class. That was a problem because I was printing to McCabe A and the printer was printing large journal articles in some cases multiple times. With the assistance of another guy we cancelled the jobs that were excessive or repetitive and that got things caught up.
I was in a rush to finish the sheet by 17:00 and I printed what I had, largely unedited at 17:00. Many other people wanted to print then so there was a delay due to that but then McCabe A had a paper jam. I then printed to McCabe B, which was backlogged in printing as well. I assisted the computer consultant to get the printer jam out of the A printer. Both of us burned our hands in the process and there were multiple jammed sheets. The last sheet was deep in the printer and folded accordion style numerous times.
That printer started printing properly again, but my document didn’t show up. I printed to Beardsley and went there and got it. By then I was 20 minutes behind so I ate dinner quickly and eventually got to Kirby for the midterm at 19:00. I did worse than I should have because I started studying too late and I felt tired. I still went to the SWIL movie at 22:00, “Solarbabies” (1986), which was a corny movie with plot holes.
I get back to my room and Nathan left a voicemail that file sharing on Milhouse wasn’t working properly so with the help of Jeff, Nathan transferred the data from Milhouse to Troy McClure as a temporary server. Ever since the server crashed on Thursday, the alias to the Phoenix partition wouldn’t work and using the Chooser to login immediately afterwards would cause it to unexpectedly quit. Logging in from the Chooser after opening it again did work. That was sort of the warning that something was wrong.
2001-10-28, Sun (Day 490, temperature at 10:04: 25.8°C, difference: +1.1°C): I dream I am at home and Thomas breaks my iMac keyboard but I am able to fix it more or less.
Later a person talks of a fractal with a million and one places, which is related to wanting to be on Jeopardy; it says this on the walkway in front of Parrish. I am standing on the beach in front of McCabe and I see a flame move on the floor on the fourth level in the hallway by the lounge. I saw this event when the library was closed on Saturday night in the evening before full darkness. I also see some smoke in that area but no development.
Later I remember I go to a Philly cheesesteak place and placing my order was not as easy as it was at Tony Luke’s. First, I don’t have bills smaller than a 20 but I do have exact change to $.13 but I can’t find a nickel easily and instead all of these dimes fall out that the cashier has to pick up. When my order comes it arrives in separate bags and is mixed with other people’s orders, which need to be sorted out as well. When I go to fix up my steak the area where I do so is dimly lit.
Today, I get up this morning and the comment saving AppleScript timed out. I later conclude that Retrospect was taking so much of the processor for the daily backup that the script messed up.
I spend a sizeable portion of the day getting the bugs out of the comment saving AppleScript. Since the script takes a long time I had it write intermediate files to show what progress has been made. I also added code to save the comments for things on the desktop. This part has a bug in it where all items are considered to be on the startup drive even if they’re not. So the comments are saved but they are assigned to the wrong drive.
With the changes I did a full run in the late afternoon. It took slightly more than three hours. I originally planned to have this script run at startup but since it takes so long I set it to run after the Retrospect configuration files are copied over. There is a three-hour window before I get up at 07:30 so that placement should be fine.
I went to the stat midterm review in Kirby at 19:00. Jesse and John decided not to go. Even though I didn’t prepare for the session I felt like I had a good understanding of what was going on for the most part.
Late in the evening I had to delete some Fleetwood Mac songs to have adequate room on the Spare partition. I didn’t get to bed until after 03:00.
2001-10-27, Sat (Day 489, temperature at 11:35: 24.7°C, difference: +0.3°C): I dreamed Jesse was driving a toy car slowly through a New York highway mini-tunnel that had red double doors. One of the entrance doors was shut so the tunnel allowed the entrance of only one lane but both lanes inside the tunnel were usable. We were in the only car in the tunnel. At one point while at the tollbooth on the south side (driving from north to south) I looked back in the tunnel, which was on a slight grade and curved but it was short enough where I could see the other end. This part was at night soon before 00:00. Jesse had to pay much more in tolls I think because we drove through the tunnel multiple times.
Later someone was getting phone support or something like that from 06:00 to 11:49, a long time.
Later I see NYC without the World Trade Center (WTC) riding from the north in the passenger seat on a light traffic wide highway towards the city. I am still surprised that the WTC isn’t there. It was moderately cloudy and during the day.
Today, I met Jesse and John outside LPAC to see an opera put on by Orchestra 2001. The last opera I saw in 1999-10 was not that good but tonight’s two operas were.
After the 20:00 performance I wrote an AppleScript to recursively go through the file structure and save info comments. These comments are supposed to be saved when TechTool is told to do so but the last two times it didn’t do that. I was about to rebuild the desktop this afternoon in addition to other maintenance but I remembered the comment bug so before I rebuilt I needed to write this script. I also wrote a companion script to read the comment files to restore the original comments. The algorithm to save the comments was simply designed but it didn’t run very fast so I went to bed while the full run was being done.
2001-10-26, Fri (Day 488, temperature at 07:31: 24.4°C, difference: -2.7°C): I remembered that I dreamed, which I normally don’t recall when I sleep little and straight through. Most dreams that I remember are from the period when I go back to bed after waking up early in the morning to when I wake up for the day. When I wake up twice that usually means I got enough sleep.
Today’s dream was vague: it had something to do with the U.S. government and I think I was in another windowless office building. The dream unsettled me as before Sept. 11 I also had vague dreams. As I was walking to breakfast I was trying to remember my dream but I couldn’t access it as a whole but instead I could query it a couple of times. I got out of it something to do with a Department of Justice agency but not Immigration & Naturalization Service.
I felt really tired upon getting up this morning and felt that way until the early afternoon. I sat with Liza at breakfast and we had good conversation. She sat in poly sci in the side row that normally is all guys, which is where I sit.
I went to Beardsley public and worked on my stat problem set until 11:30. I took a break for lunch and went to McCabe to finish. I didn’t finish until after 13:30 not leaving me much time to spare with the set due at 14:00. In the afternoon I originally was going to take a nap but I felt more awake when the time came so I worked on The Phoenix online edition. I didn’t finish reading the articles until after 23:00.
I also went to an education department symposium at 19:30 in Lang Concert Hall featuring a video lecture of Herb Kohl and a telephone question and answer. Originally Kohl was going to come to campus but his wife advised otherwise.
2001-10-25, Thu (Day 487, temperature at 09:36: 27.1°C, difference: +0.6°C): I got up at 09:33 and that was only due to the sun directly shining in my face. I don’t even remember hearing my alarm go off at 07:30 and the battery radio was set to buzz, which I did recently due to weak batteries not playing the radio. I didn’t know if the buzzer would go on indefinitely or it would shut off. Apparently it times out after some amount of time, about two hours or less.
My first class was at 09:55 and I usually leave at 09:45 so I didn’t have much time to get ready. Fortunately my bag was already prepped so I got dressed, ate something, and went up the hill. I briefly studied before stat and before the Psych 34 midterm started but I felt very uneasy. When I took the midterm I felt better and afterwards I felt much better.
I continued working on the online edition before research design and before and after dinner. I went to ed board at 19:30, which was much shorter since the story lists were written on the board but not commented on. Even though that made the meeting shorter that sort of created a disconnection between section and non-section staff.
The Milhouse server messed up this afternoon and the Phoenix Management user disappeared. The problem still was not fixed by the evening so for the interim I used my Windows login, which Nathan recommended. I stayed up in the office until about 02:00 working on my stat problem set and assisting Nathan in getting the users and groups for the server working again. Apparently the users and groups file was corrupted, as the ssias1 login would not cause the groups that he belonged to to display group members unless he was logged in. Also when ssias1 logged in he showed in the main listing but otherwise he was absent. Nathan tried repairing the file with a utility but that made things worse so he reverted to a backup.
While Nathan was fixing this he also made Phoenix Admin and Phoenix Staff logins so Phoenix Management no longer has write access to critical areas of Phoenix. Phoenix Admin has write access anywhere like how Phoenix Management was previously. Phoenix Staff can only write to Copy folders in the Current Issue section folders.
2001-10-24, Wed (Day 486, temperature at 07:29: 26.5°C, difference: +0.3°C): I printed out the psych of language presentation slides between poly sci and MedX. It took some experimentation to get it to print out ideally. I ended up rotating the page and printing six per side, double sided.
I get down to Mullan and Elizabeth is there but Frank the instructor isn’t and someone else shows up for the class who hasn’t shown up before. Frank never shows up and he isn’t in his office. I leave a message, which he returns later and says to meet next Monday at 10:30. Elizabeth was in my free weights section in the first half of this semester.
In the afternoon I went to McCabe to study for the psych of language midterm tomorrow. I went up to the office after 16:30. Things seemed fine, but about half a minute after Dan left for the printer Dee said to stop Dan. She later told me she was exporting to EPS page 11 and that failed meaning Delco the printer would not be able to process the page. Liz and Seth went to find him and they couldn’t so we tried to find someone else to also drive to Delco with the fixed page 11. Dee was able to borrow a friend’s car but she didn’t exactly know how to get there and no one else really did. As a result I went with her as I had some idea of how to get to Delco also. This half-and-half should add up to full knowledge of how to get to the Delco Times building.
The phone number for Delco on the wall was wrong so I needed to bring up Nathan’s tech doc that had the right number. Dee told Delco that there was a problem with page 11 but a new one was coming over.
Dee and I drove over to Delco but traffic on Baltimore Pike and elsewhere made the entire trip take an hour. Afterwards, I wasn’t too far behind though because I worked a little faster the rest of the night. I went to bed at 02:30 not feeling tired but if I wanted to get some sleep for tomorrow I needed to stop then.
2001-10-23, Tue (Day 485, temperature at 07:30: 26.2°C, difference: -0.3°C): My dream was in an unknown room in Papazian and students were talking about Barry. When events on and following Sept. 11 happen, he just starts reading a lot.
I tried doing work today but I couldn’t get to it until the evening due to various reasons. In the morning I was too tired. I am essentially going to bed at the time I have been in the first half of the semester, but when I did that during break I slept until 10:00 while otherwise I get up at 07:30. Losing two hours of sleep every day adds up quickly.
The discussion in Ed’s class was good today. He let us out early with the midterm on Thursday. I went to lunch thinking it would be easier to find a seat in the small room but it was no better. The serving lines didn’t form yet though. Nathan and Justin sat with me and we talked about continual updates to The Phoenix Online and somewhat related topics.
I planned on doing something in the early afternoon before research design but instead I was in Sharples talking to Nathan until 14:30.
I was able to sit next to Jesse in research design, who was sitting next to John this time. Many times previously I would get to class at a reasonable time but everyone else showed up early and filled in the seats. Sara sat to my right.
In the late afternoon I procrastinated in an attempt to unwind. After dinner I wrote a draft of my methods section for research design and prepped for the other tasks this week. Ani Difranco seems like a “I am woman; hear me roar” sort of person.
I discovered that opening an Audion-associated MP3 in the Finder while Audion is starting to play another MP3 causes a freeze requiring a restart. I also noticed that putting the LaCie CD in the drive at startup does not always cause the native driver to load for the USB hard drive. I have to manually unplug and replug the drive to get the native drivers to load instead of the generic driver. I need the native drivers since the ‘expel’ AppleScript command in “Synch Retrospect setup” only works to mount the USB partitions if the native driver is used. Additionally, LimeWire will only save its options if you quit using the Exit command in the application window. A standard command-Q will not save the settings.
I didn’t delete very many files so the free disk space is continuing to dwindle.
2001-10-22, Mon (Day 484, temperature at 07:31: 26.5°C, difference: +2.1°C, October holiday ends): This morning I went to Mullan for MedX as the free weights class finished on the Friday starting break. I came early but only two other people showed up. Frank is also teaching this class. Since there are only three people in the class there is the possibility the section may be cancelled.
Next week starts Math 6C so my Monday, Wednesday, Friday mornings will become busier but I do get the afternoon back as free weights was in the early afternoon in the first half of this semester.
I needed to do a full backup to the B backup drive today, which I did this afternoon. I moved three of the four large cinder blocks in the closet to near the window so I have a partial windowsill. I primarily set this up for my dying cactus but also for my phone. Both things were on the floor by the window. Even though my window faces the south and lets in a good amount of sunlight, the light doesn’t fall on the ground right by the window, where my plant was located. Also, since I keep my room dimly lit at night the cactus wasn’t doing so well. I inherited the cinder blocks by moving into this Worth room. This room apparently was M33 at one point as the emergency evacuation plan on my door labels it as such as well as on the back of the room mirror. Now M33 is M30 and Alex’s room is M33, which is by the bathroom.
In the evening I planned on doing work but I ended up doing another LimeWire upgrade due to a bug I ran into over the past few days. I also did Gnutella research along the way. I went to the SWIL movie “Killer Tomatoes Eat France!” at 22:00. This movie made in 1991 was very corny but for that it was funny. This outing marked a three-week gap where I didn’t go out to movies or similar things due to lack of availability or being busy. I don’t think I feel any better after this gap.
2001-10-21, Sun (Day 483, temperature at 09:48: 24.4°C, difference: +0.2°C): I got up later than I wanted to but I still hung up my NASA Earth Observing System posters, making my walls seem somewhat less bare. I revised my poly sci mid-term in the afternoon and in the evening since I was working fairly slowly. I hung out in Jesse’s room after dinner to watch the evening news in between revising the paper.
2001-10-20, Sat (Day 482, temperature at 08:47: 24.2°C, difference: -0.5°C): I went home today and returned to campus in the evening.
2001-10-19, Fri (Day 481, temperature at 11:21: 24.7°C, difference: -4.2°C): I went to the library for most of the afternoon to continue my poly sci mid-term.
I continued the paper after dinner in my room and went to bed an hour earlier than I did last night.
2001-10-18, Thu (Day 480, temperature at 09:01: 28.9°C, difference: +4.5°C): I shut my window before I went to bed last night to see if my heater would turn off and that turned out not to be the case. I caught up my journal in the afternoon and then went to McCabe to start my poly sci mid-term. I got there in the late afternoon and with the library closing at 16:30 I didn’t have much time to work. I also had a hard time getting started so I only managed to get one page written.
After 16:30 I wanted to listen to the radio but that turned out to be a challenge as the reception in Worth is bad. Sometime later I switched from WSTW 93.7 to Y100, which in a sense is returning to my senior year of high school. The station didn’t break up like WSTW did in the morning when I tried to listen to it and Y100 has a good feel to it. I was surprised when they did the “Top Seven at 8,” reminding me of my Trucksess Top Seven from high school. I checked Y100’s web site and it didn’t have anything about that show, as it must be new.
In the evening I got the mess of new bags that Dad has been dropping off over the past week off of the floor and I also cut the nearly 60 items on the desktop in half.
2001-10-17, Wed (Day 479, temperature at 11:00: 24.4°C, difference: -1.8°C): I finished the whois lookups sometime after 22:00. After that point I unwound but still didn’t stop until 02:00. Since the netblock task took up half of my break I wouldn’t be able to go home today so instead I’ll go home Saturday.
2001-10-16, Tue (Day 478, temperature at 10:54: 26.2°C, difference: +1.7°C): I spent virtually the entire day looking up netblocks. By the end of today I learned of a few ways of doing things more efficiently so I could finish a little faster and reduce repetitive fatigue. I also learned that WhatRoute isn’t designed to look up this many queries or be open most of the day. My computer crashed much more frequently during this period.
2001-10-15, Mon (Day 477, temperature at 10:05: 24.5°C, difference: -3.3°C): I spent virtually the entire day looking up netblocks.
2001-10-14, Sun (Day 476, temperature at 11:20: 27.8°C, difference: -0.9°C): I spent virtually the entire day looking up netblocks.
2001-10-13, Sat (Day 475, temperature at 09:28: 28.7°C, difference: +1.0°C): Since I planned on staying on campus longer than today I needed to do the wash. It almost seemed like I shouldn’t have done so as at one point all three washers were doing something irregular. The left and center machines were overflowing with water, like the problem from the first week this semester. The right washer, the one I was actually using was doing something even more odd. It would start to rinse but then it would immediately switch to a spin cycle that was much more pronounced than normal. I left the lid of the spinning washer open and proceeded to e-mail workbox.
I came back a few minutes later and the machine I was using then worked normally prompting a correction e-mail. It took almost five hours total to do the laundry since I needed to do everything in serial with other people using the other four machines. In other words it was more difficult to do the wash during break when fewer people are here than during a normal week.
I finished the online edition by the evening and then worked on Phoenix stats. I started what would be a four day long process of obtaining netblock information for second-level IP addresses. For example, the 130.58 prefix is Swarthmore College. I had about 5,000 of these to look up. For each day until I finished, I got up sometime in the morning and did whois queries for these netblocks with WhatRoute. I also played my MP3s and worked until 02:00 the next day.
2001-10-12, Fri (Day 474, temperature at 07:31: 27.7°C, difference: +0.2°C, October holiday starts today): Following comparative politics I went to McCabe to start and finish this week’s stat problem set before lunch. Since there were no computer problems and I was on a rush it was not that difficult. In the afternoon I went to my last free weights class. On return from break I will continue with MedX in Mullan.
I noticed before I left for class this afternoon that Milhouse, the publications server was not on the network. I needed some art from the server since I wasn’t done with this week’s Phoenix issue yet. I was hoping that when I got back from class Jeff would be in the office or the server would be back online. I figured both would be unlikely since the October holiday starts today.
Sure enough the server was still down after class so I went to Ben West, got the key for the student publications office, and restarted the server. Before bringing it up with all of the services running, I pruned the system folder in the hopes that I would eliminate the crashing by cleaning things up. I found out the next day that it didn’t help as the server was off the network again. I think Nathan’s backup script interface with the Copy Stories script is causing the problem but we haven’t been able to figure out what the problem is.
While I was up in the office I copied the art that I needed over to my computer so that way if the server crashed again I wouldn’t need to go back up to the office. I am still running low on disk space due to continually growing log files and Phoenix Online web-docs. I also haven’t pruned my entire hard drive since September of last year. Due to these two conditions I needed to copy to the Spare USB drive partition, which took much longer, so long I wonder if many Ethernet packets were being dropped because the sending computer was expecting a certain receiving throughput, which it wasn’t getting.
While this slow copy was going on I did maintenance on the client computers in the office. I intended to get to all of them but I only partially got through the slowest one, Homer the Power Mac 7200. I went to dinner slightly early after returning the key. I sat with Dave and Norense. Jesse sat down later as well as a few other people. People left individually but I think I was there the longest.
After dinner I hung out in Jesse’s room playing video games and watching TV.
2001-10-11, Thu (Day 473, temperature at 09:02: 27.5°C, difference: +2.5°C): I’m writing this entry a Thursday later so many details have been lost. In between other events of the day I worked on the online edition, though not finishing.
2001-10-10, Wed (Day 472, temperature at 07:31: 25.0°C, difference: +1.1°C): I felt this morning during breakfast that I should just go home the entire October holiday week. Then during comparative Jeffrey hands out the take-home midterm, which is fairly lengthy, but the due date is the Monday on return from break. This setup almost requires you to work on the assignment over break due to the timing. Later in the day I figured I would stay on campus for half of the break.
I got The Phoenix pages due at 17:00 done before 21:30 up to the art but not having yet read the articles. I felt so tired after the second deadline I just put the remainder of the text up and went to bed. I was making mistakes and I couldn’t concentrate.
2001-10-09, Tue (Day 471, temperature at 07:30: 23.9°C, difference: +0.7°C): I started eating lunch with Tom who left for seminar about a half-hour later but I ended up staying in total for almost an hour. Food options haven’t been very good recently although I got the chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream flavor today at lunch.
I went to The Phoenix mini-ed board meeting at 21:00, which reminded me of ed board meetings of past where there was a reasonable number of people and the amount of dialog did not cause conversations to split into groups.
2001-10-08, Mon (Day 470, temperature at 07:31: 23.2°C, difference: +3.6°C): I worked on Phoenix stats for most of the day but am still some distance away from completion.
2001-10-07, Sun (Day 469, temperature at 07:30: 19.6°C, difference: -6.0°C): I dream I was at Penn talking to some other people about car traffic around the campus. A five-mile segment of I-76 north of Center City Philadelphia shown to me on a map was said to be so crowded it would not be worth going on it unless you wanted to just sit in traffic.
Next, I am in a store in a mall in central PA. The place sells theatre tickets and is a subway stop for orange colored trains. The cashier starts telling me what tickets are available when I ask her but then we are distracted by what is hanging around on the ceiling including a very small beehive and two brown and black striped tarantulas. One tarantula climbs on my bed, which happens to be in the store. My bed is made with the dark blue comforter on it. The spider tries to leave through the doorway but I squash it and the cashier gets the other one at the other side of the store.
I didn’t get much done today especially in the morning and the afternoon. The heat came on this morning but apparently my heater is temperamental as it has a loose dial and likes to vent steam periodically. The United States and Great Britain attacked Afghanistan today in response to the terrorist attacks on the WTC and Pentagon on --09-11, Tue. I finished my poly sci paper this afternoon in Beardsley public. I was there the entire afternoon since I got distracted periodically.
After dinner I restarted LimeWire as its memory allocation grew in excess of 50 MB. On bringing it up, the listening port changed to 6347 from 6346. I thought that was strange and after some searching it seems that Mac users were having problems connecting at port 6346. It is possible the LimeWire host cache changed the port to listen on to help people out, but it just caused me to spend an hour to figure out what was going on. I could have set the port back or just opened up 6347 without question but I wanted to know why it happened.
I picked up Phoenix statistics again for the rest of the evening but I still have a way to go with the project.
This weekend was unique in that I didn’t go out at all and I thought that by doing that I would get more done but it seems like the opposite effect occurred.
2001-10-06, Sat (Day 468, temperature at 10:06: 25.6°C, difference: +1.4°C): I slept through most of the morning, had a big lunch, and then did the wash while finishing the online edition. I didn’t finish this week’s Phoenix issue until soon after dinner. I then caught up my journal and started my poly sci paper for Monday.
2001-10-05, Fri (Day 467, temperature at 07:31: 24.2°C, difference: 0.0°C): I got up this morning feeling quite bad as I had a 08:30 class. I was having a hard time staying awake for comparative and during the class I considered taking a nap in the Tarble Atrium in Trotter despite my stat problem set being due at 14:00. I decided to go to Beardsley public anyway following class and at that time I regained some energy to finish the set. I was running behind since I wanted to go to lunch before the rush but I remembered that the McCabe achievement award get-together was today from 12:00 to 13:00 in Sharples.
That delayed start gave me time to read over my set and still have somewhere to sit. Rebecca organized the event and only Allen sat down in addition. It was half the number from last year’s gathering. Our table lost exclusiveness later in the hour as a matching number of non-McCabes sat down including a spec and a Swattie. The discussion near the end after the non-McCabes left turned to computer science topics since us three have some sort of interest in it.
I continued working on the online edition until 15:30. I started to get really tired even though it was really bright in my room. I took a nap expecting to get up around 17:00 but instead I woke up at 19:00. Jesse, John, or Tom later said they tried calling me at 18:30 but I didn’t hear my phone ring, which I normally do when sleeping. When I got up at 19:00 I initially thought it was around 05:00 since it was somewhat bright in my room. I then realized that I overslept. I worked on the online edition for the rest of the night, not going out.
On my late afternoon dinner nap I dreamed I was walking around the north campus near Kohlberg going towards LPAC. There were some differences, one was there were American flags everywhere, and some of the buildings (especially Kohlberg) were a little bigger and looked like center city hotels.
I went into LPAC since there was a concert or some sort of a mass discussion about the events of Sept. 11 or something along those lines. I went early and it was already crowded. There still were open blocks of seats near the back though. The layout of the auditorium included the cinema seats as well as the theater. Compared to real life, the sides were much more defined, added quite a few extra seats, and made the space seem arena-like. The ceiling was lower and I had a hard time seeing the front stage area simply because it was so far away as the pitch of the seating was much higher.
Apparently the event was only open to the college as I am wearing a light blue shirt when I see a public safety person wearing a white uniform shirt rush from behind me and move to throw out a Ville rat. He tackles the Swarthmore resident to the ground as apparently he was giving trouble. An announcement on the PA is made saying that public safety has thrown a Ville rat out so the audience is made aware to look out for more.
2001-10-04, Thu (Day 466, temperature at 07:31: 24.2°C, difference: +2.2°C): I got up not feeling too bad but I definitely felt in a rush most of the day. Andrew was out of sorts in research design today, needing to go back to his office to get something a few times.
After Phoenix ed board I hung out with Nathan who was writing an AppleScript to back up the server. Yesterday he informed me that the server was not being backed up, which sort of disturbed me. With my assistance he got the script working and following that he wrote a login script to mount the Phoenix volume if you select Phoenix as the publication once the Finder loads on the client machines.
While Nathan was working I continued my stat problem set on the conference side of the office. It is nice to have computers in a less dense area of the office, as I was able to get problems done even though people were talking on the other side of the room. I didn’t get back to Worth until after 03:00.
2001-10-03, Wed (Day 465, temperature at 07:31: 22.0°C, difference: +3.4°C): I continued working on Phoenix statistics around breakfast, lunch, and classes until I went up to the office at 16:30. I did the later part of the web exporting for the 17:00 pages on Sideshow Bob, which was working normally. However, at about 20:30 Brendan calls me and says Sideshow is giving a blinking question mark on startup. I stopped working on the online edition a half-hour early to come up to the office and fix the computer. At that point demand for G4s went down so getting it working was not as critical. At first the computer ejected the TechTool CD but upon reinserting it and waiting a while the G4 started up normally with the startup drive. I took the CD out and the Mac restarted fine. I did a fair amount of maintenance work so it should have a better chance of working in the future.
I talked to Nathan a fair amount after the 22:00 deadline about technical office things while he worked on the Swarthmore College Bulletin site that Justin and him are redesigning. As a result, I didn’t return to Worth until after 01:00. I got the rest of the text on the site and just went to bed, trying to get a couple hours of sleep since I had an entire stat problem set to do tomorrow as well as the online edition.
2001-10-02, Tue (Day 464, temperature at 07:30: 18.6°C, difference: +0.2°C): My dream was at Philly International Airport at night. I find a way to get to the runway from the terminal. The door that leads to the runway is on the basement. The main runway didn’t look very wide and standing facing north towards the terminal I could see the east end of the runway since I was standing closer to that end. I looked down to my left and the west end extended into the horizon. I went to return to the terminal but I almost forgot how I got there until I saw the light coming from the basement door that I exited from.
In the times that I wasn’t in class or doing something else I was working on getting Analog working well with the web stat data. Phil thought my stat class proposal using the web stat data was interesting, so time spent with the web stat data also applies to that class.
2001-10-01, Mon (Day 463, temperature at 07:31: 18.4°C, difference: -1.0°C): My computer was up for 3 days and 11 hours before iDo caused a hang that made a restart ideal. I was able to force quit the iDo extension and get back control of the computer. Earlier during this uptime run, IE unexpectedly quit with a type 2 error but since I wasn’t doing anything intense and I didn’t want to go through the trouble of restarting I just kept going. After analyzing the personal time logs that I have been keeping the past two weeks, I worked on Phoenix statistics from the late afternoon and into the evening. I didn’t go to the SWIL movie, continuing the trend from last week, but I did stop before 00:00.
