Journal 2003-02

Current entries

2003-02-28, Fri (Day 801, temperature at 08:00: 23.9°C, difference: +0.7°C): Carr Everbach on behalf of Swarthmore College received a recycling award at Sharples lunch today. The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection gave out the award. Seven life-sized puppets of bottles, cans, a newspaper, and a tire that spelled out the word “recycle” were also part of the presentation.

I finished my astronomy problem set in Cornell in the afternoon. I read today’s New York Times before going to dinner close to 19:00. The Friday New York Times is traditionally long due to the weekend guide but this Friday’s edition was notably long even after accounting for the day of the week.

I ate dinner very quickly so I could go to the 19:30 showing of “The Virgin Suicides” in Kirby. I planned to go to the Paces party held by SASS tonight but I got very tired while reading an Oregonian tonight so instead I went to bed before 00:00.

2003-02-27, Thu (Day 800, temperature at 07:00: 23.2°C, difference: -0.1°C): I dreamed that I could see more of the Crum woods from my window. I could see as far as the Blue Route. Fewer trees and steep slopes down the hill made it easier to see the woods and highway. I also dreamed I called the wrong number to dial home. I instead reached someone at the development office of a hospital. I was calling from a cheesesteak grill place. I dialed again and got through to home.

I studied for my psych midterm early this morning. After getting back from breakfast I went to McCabe to study. After my environmental studies class I had the psych decision making midterm.

I did Phoenix stuff in the late afternoon, which included updating the site search engine and the random article script as well as sending out a project list e-mail. I went to pub night from 21:30 to almost 00:00.

2003-02-26, Wed (Day 799, temperature at 08:00: 23.3°C, difference: -0.7°C): I dreamed I was at the Morton Ave Wawa in Folsom with Mom. We needed to leave the parking lot but it involved maneuvering behind the store and out to the street on this narrow dirt path on the north edge of the lot. I go stand on the sidewalk across the street and am now holding a book. I help signal her when to pull out into opposing traffic with a blue arrow.

I went to the Beardsley computer lab this afternoon to look at a text size issue on The Phoenix Online with Windows IE, print environmental studies readings, and write up my astronomy lab report. I turned in the report at 16:55, stopped in Wharton briefly, and then went to Parrish for the first Phoenix deadline.

Around the dinner hour I implemented a pre-built poll system in The Phoenix Online web directory. The first poll was placed on the front page with the early edition, “Are conservative views shortchanged at Swat?”

I left the office after 19:00 and I still had to do the stuff I normally do in the afternoon. I put up my journal and read today’s New York Times along with a recent Oregonian. I planned to read four older papers today after coming back from the publications office for the second deadline. However I got back too late to get to them today.

2003-02-25, Tue (Day 798, temperature at 08:01: 24.0°C, difference: +0.2°C): I dreamed I was talking with Norense while I was erasing the whiteboard on my door. The conversation got into whiteboard cleaner, which I happened to be using in my hand. In real life when I got up this morning there was a message of thanks written on my whiteboard.

After I put my journal online this morning and read Swatmail I went to class. I went to the Lang Music Building this afternoon so I could answer questions about the architecture of the building for art history. I also made interior and exterior sketches of the building. Despite spending a good portion of the afternoon in Lang I still read two newspapers before going to dinner after 18:30. In the evening I read four more newspapers. After doing other stuff I went to bed at around 01:00.

2003-02-24, Mon (Day 797, temperature at 08:00: 23.8°C, difference: -0.5°C): I dreamed I was at Davis Trading Post on Chester Pike in Ridley Park. I was walking home on the northwest side of Chester Pike when bugs and insects swarmed over the area. Most of the swarms were brown. Things were especially bad at the Stoney Creek bridge.

I need to go through my day more efficiently than before due to the increased number I things I need to do now. I had yesterday’s journal written and online before I went to class in the morning so I would have more of the afternoon to do other things. I did the weekly log rotation this afternoon in about an hour. Last week this step took all day. After 16:30 I finally got to the newspaper reading stage. For at least the next month and a half, I need to read six newspapers a day. Before dinner I am reading today’s New York Times and the most recent Oregonian. After dinner I am reading two old issues of The New York Times and two old issues of The Oregonian. The four old issues are all blocked into a two-hour window and the two new issues are also blocked into another two-hour timeframe.

I managed to get the first two issues read before dinner at about 18:30. I had an abbreviated dinner and while this short amount of time spent in Sharples did help me stay on schedule it was difficult to read the older issues in a half-hour. In the evening I went to Beardsley briefly to print out environmental studies reading, checked e-mail, and went to bed soon after 00:00.

2003-02-23, Sun (Day 796, temperature at 12:55: 24.3°C, difference: +0.1°C): I got up early this afternoon and went to Sharples after the end of lunch. After preparing for class tomorrow and reading e-mail I organized the New York Times and Oregonians that I have not read yet. While I have been reading and getting rid of the Times as they have been arriving since January I still have not read almost any Oregonians to present and I have last year’s Times to read as well.

I also added the Oregonians that I did not receive over winter break to my spreadsheet that computes how many days it took for the issue to arrive at Swarthmore. I assembled the spreadsheet during winter break so I already had the issues that I received then in the document.

This task took the rest of the day and evening to finish. I wanted to have done this a month ago but I got sick, which threw everything off.

2003-02-22, Sat (Day 795, temperature at 08:01: 24.2°C, difference: +0.7°C): I did the laundry this morning and tried to figure out why the Internet was down today. It came back up again at about 11:00.

I worked on my CS assignment in the afternoon. The assignment was to input a few lines of text from the user and place the pairs of letters in a frequency distribution table. I went to dinner from 17:00 to 17:30 and returned to the Sun lab to continue working. I left the lab right before 20:00.

After leaving Sproul I stopped by Wharton briefly and then went to Beardsley computer lab to work on my second paper for environmental studies. After finishing the paper I went to Olde Club late this evening. The headliner, Hrvatski, cancelled, but the other groups, Dev79, Ed Flis, and Moblin performed. Nevertheless the showed lasted until almost 02:00.

2003-02-21, Fri (Day 794, temperature at 08:00: 23.5°C, difference: -0.2°C): Today resembled a long continuous stream of events from beginning to end. Due to the test on Wednesday there was no lab in CS today. In the afternoon I completed my astronomy problem set due today at 17:00. I actually needed to finish an hour early since dinner for Matt’s birthday was tonight. I didn’t have my problem set ready to turn in until after 16:00 and by then I was cutting it close to catching the SEPTA 16:21 R3 train on time. When I left Cornell, where I was working on the assignment, I saw Matt so I figured that I wasn’t that far behind if he wasn’t at the train station yet.

I dropped my problem set off in DuPont and walked briskly to Wharton to drop off my bag. I appreciated the convenience of having my room very close to an exterior door, as getting rid of my bag did not take long. I then dashed down the hill to the train station. I wanted to walk but I sensed I wouldn’t make in it time if I went that slowly so I had to jog there.

At the base of Magill Walk I met up with Norense, so I figured there was a reasonable amount of time before the train came. However Norense told me to hurry up since he heard the train but I didn’t yet. I then see the train arrive at the station so I had to push my way around a slow walker in front of me and sprint the rest of the way. It was difficult to sprint since there were three sets of stairs to cover, one down to the tunnel and two to go up to the other side of the station. Our group got off at Market East and walked to the Darbar Grill.

After dinner we walked to the Ritz Five to watch the movie “Talk to Her” at 19:30. We were informed at the end of the movie that we had to hurry back to the Market East station to make the 21:50 train. So not only did I have to dash to the Swarthmore station to get to Philly I also had to dash to the Market East station to get out of Philly.

Four of us including me got to the station platform three minutes before the train was to arrive. The rest of our group arrived about a minute and a half later. The train arrived on time and left promptly.

Back on campus, some of our group went to Matt’s birthday party in Wharton D basement. I didn’t stay long since I needed to do a number of things before I could go to bed. By this point it was almost 23:00. I put my journal online, read the New York Times, read e-mail, and then went to bed.

2003-02-20, Thu (Day 793, temperature at 08:00: 23.7°C, difference: +0.9°C): In the evening I revised my art history paper and following that I went to pub night.

2003-02-19, Wed (Day 792, temperature at 08:00: 22.8°C, difference: +0.7°C): I dreamed I was taking an art history quiz that involved going on a scavenger hunt/tour around campus. I got back from the tour late and since the quiz was more like a long exam I couldn’t finish it in the limited time I had left. We were supposed to finish them in a half-hour but I didn’t even have that. I had a test next class (which is true today) so the art history prof said I could finish it after lunch.

Still in my dream, the room I was to go to after lunch to finish my quiz had a Chinese class in it. The prof called on me near the beginning of class, asking if the group activity she asked her class to do was interesting. I replied yes, saying that I wasn’t even in this class normally but I was in the room to finish a test. Even out of context this activity sounded interesting. Note that in my dream the campus looked somewhat different than it actually does.

I received a voicemail this afternoon from my father asking when I could come home to fix the Power Mac. A couple days ago visiting the Delco Times web site caused the computer to crash and then it gave a blinking question mark on startup. I returned the call saying this afternoon was best. At home, the monitor took a long time to warm up and it remained dim when starting up from a CD. As a result it was difficult to see what I was doing.

Starting up from a CD and reaching the Finder caused a dialog to appear about the startup partition being unreadable and asking if it should be initialized. After saying no to that a similar dialog appeared for the RAM Disk. However canceling this dialog just caused it to reappear incessantly. I initialized the RAM Disk since it just contained web browser cache files and then proceeded to get the startup partition to mount. TechTool Pro was unable to mount the drive to make directory repairs but Disk First Aid managed to get it to mount. After that point though both utilities kept trying to fix directory problems but when I would run the utility again it still had the same or an alternating problem. Neither of the disk utilities made the partition bootable again until I opened and closed the System Folder, apparently causing it to be blessed.

I then erased the startup partition, updated the disk driver with Drive Setup, and restored data from a 2003-01-18 backup. Note that on 2002-12-27 I also needed to erase the startup partition on the Power Mac due a directory problem that would not go away. At that time I had not updated the disk driver.

In the publications office for the first Phoenix deadline I rolled into this week’s front page template the automatic image attribute loading code. After getting the early edition online I went to Sharples for dinner after 19:10. Despite this late arrival time I made it inside before the card checkers left. However, things in the serving and dining area were closing out. Not all of the water dispensers were still turned on. I saw that cookie dough ice cream was sitting on the ice cream bar counter so I got a big bowl of it at the beginning. If I went to get it after eating the rest of my food it might have been put away. Later the chairs at other tables were being put up, which was a sign that things were really closing. By this time it was about 19:45.

I stopped by Wharton briefly and then went to the Tarble Gym for the last home women’s basketball game. I got there a few minutes after 20:00 but the game still was going on. I brought my New York Times with me since I wasn’t able to read it this afternoon. It was odd reading the paper in time slices while watching parts of the game but I was able to follow the flow of the articles without too much trouble.

Swarthmore defeated Muhlenberg 51 to 46. I didn’t finish the paper by the time the game ended at 20:45 so I continued reading in my room up until 22:00 when I went up to the publications office. I saw near Clothier that the office was dark so I figured the second deadline was met early, which it seemed to have been after looking at the modification times of the page PDFs.

2003-02-18, Tue (Day 791, temperature at 08:00: 22.1°C, difference: +0.8°C): I went to the Tarble Atrium in Trotter before classes started this morning to do environmental studies reading. I finished reading the New York Times very close to 18:00.

This evening I had an astronomy lab in DuPont 134, the room where I also had Physics 3 and 4 labs. Following the lab I went to Cornell to study for an astronomy quiz and a CS test, both tomorrow. I left the library soon before it closed at 00:00. Upon returning to Wharton I read e-mail very quickly so I could go to bed at once and be rested for the evaluations tomorrow.

2003-02-17, Mon (Day 790, temperature at 08:00: 21.3°C, difference: +0.9°C): The snowstorm continued today but ended by the mid-afternoon. The morning precipitation was a mixture of sleet and snow. The plain snow later in the day was quite large in size due to the warmer temperatures. Most of the snowfall for the storm was smaller in size due to the colder air.

The bookstore was closed so I could not get a New York Times and the mailroom was closed so I could not pick up my Oregonians. In the evening I went to Beardsley to finish my short psych essay, which I completed at around 20:30. I went to Cornell to answer pre-lab questions for tomorrow night and then briefly went back to Wharton. I then went to Kirby Lecture Hall in Martin to watch the SWIL movie in Martin at 22:00.

2003-02-16, Sun (Day 789, temperature at 08:01: 20.4°C, difference: -1.3°C): I got up this morning to the beginning of an all day snowstorm. A few inches were on the ground already on top of the previous storms: a small one yesterday and one last Friday, 2003-02-07. I walked over to the Tarble gym at 10:00 to see if the badminton Northeast Collegiate Tournament was still taking place. The event started at 08:00 and I didn’t know if it was postponed due to the snow. I got to the gym and the tournament was going on and there were some spectators present as well. The gym was divided into six badminton courts that ran independently. Most of the time there was a match at each court. I stayed for an hour and then went to lunch.

In the afternoon I went to the publications office to burn CDs for The Phoenix. It took a long time to burn the first CD due to the preparation needed but I did do most of them by dinner. Also in the afternoon I did reading for class while waiting on the CD burner.

The visibility in the afternoon was very low at points due the intensity of the snow. At one point when I looked out the Parrish fourth floor hall window I could not see beyond the SEPTA railroad tracks. On a clear day I can see at least to the Delaware River.

After dinner I finished the CD burning in the office and finished writing the draft for a short psych essay in Beardsley. I had started the draft late this afternoon.

2003-02-15, Sat (Day 788, temperature at 08:00: 21.7°C, difference: -0.1°C): I dreamed I was in the student publications office for the second Phoenix deadline on Wednesday. The lights dimmed significantly early on, so I told Dan and Yavor to save their work in case the power went out. I checked again to see which computers were connected to the UPS outlets.

I got up this morning to have the laundry finished by lunch. Before lunch I started my CS assignment due tonight from my room. It seemed clumsier to use a SSH window to do work than on one of the spice computers in the Sun lab. For example the command “emacs &” didn’t open a new window since there wasn’t a window manager running in SSH. Instead the process sort of got lost except when I went to logout I was warned about it still being open. I had to manually kill processes to gracefully logout.

I went to the Sun lab to do my CS assignment in the afternoon. This week I needed to compute what day of the week an entered date was on. In the evening I read the New York Times.

2003-02-14, Fri (Day 787, temperature at 07:15: 21.8°C, difference: -0.6°C): I got up at 07:00 so I could work on my astronomy problem set this morning. I finished my problem set this afternoon in Cornell and then went to Beardsley to revise my lab report, which was due with the problem set at 17:00 today.

I did the stuff I normally do in the afternoon before dinner but I realized after 18:30 that I wouldn’t be able to finish turning through the New York Times before going to dinner. As a result I took a break, went to dinner, and when I got back finished looking through the paper.

2003-02-13, Thu (Day 786, temperature at 07:00: 22.4°C, difference: -0.9°C): This afternoon I did some Phoenix related things. I got to dinner at about 18:30 and I needed to leave before 19:00 to go to the Phoenix ed board meeting.

After the meeting, which only lasted an hour, I fixed the WSRN PDF, which spanned onto two pages, but the PDF processing script only sent the first page. The problem was not that easy to fix.

I got to Paces for pub night at 22:00 and I got there late enough where it made sense to stay until 00:00 instead of leaving early. After the event I posted to Blackboard for art history, read e-mail, took a shower, and went to bed.

2003-02-12, Wed (Day 785, temperature at 08:01: 23.3°C, difference: +1.6°C): CS 21 today involved writing a program that constructed Pascal’s triangle. The afternoon led to cascading delays, in part due to me needing to wait for the Retrospect recycle backup to set B to finish, which it did at 13:40.

I also needed to move files from the Phoenix partition to Moe since the server partition was running out of space. That took an hour to do. I was tired in the late afternoon so I didn’t get to finish the New York Times before dinner. I needed to go to the publications office at 17:00 for the first Phoenix deadline so I had less time to read the paper than on other days anyway.

For dinner others on staff ordered Chinese food, so I got a pint of beef and broccoli. Rice came with the order. In the time between Phoenix deadlines I planned to go to Beardsley to print documents. Finishing this item involved me arriving to the publications office late. A lengthy portion of time was spent printing one reading that was about 110 MB in file size, which took five minutes to download and about twenty minutes to print.

The reading was not that long, so the document page count was not a factor for the large file. The job effectively held up other pending tasks for that length of time. Fortunately printer demand was not that high when I sent the huge reading. John told me the next morning during class that when the reading was being printed that morning 30 pending jobs were waiting in line. Some of the queue items were there multiple times since people thought the printer was not getting it the first time so they sent the job again.

I did manage to leave the publications office at 00:30, which is the earliest I have left the office after a Phoenix issue in awhile.

2003-02-11, Tue (Day 784, temperature at 08:00: 21.7°C, difference: -2.0°C): I got my Swatmail caught up this afternoon and went to Martin sometime around 16:00 for a garage sale in the old Introductory Biology Lab. I picked up a few computer cables for older Macintoshes. The cables were free although other items did have a price on them. I spent a good portion of the evening cleaning out The Phoenix Online of test and temporary files.

2003-02-10, Mon (Day 783, temperature at 08:00: 23.7°C, difference: -0.1°C): Art history today was in the larger classroom next door to the one we normally meet at. I read old Swatmail this evening and got to start the log rotation procedure before going to the publications office for the 22:00 Phoenix ed board meeting. The meeting ended inside a half-hour so I returned to my room earlier than expected to finish rotating the logs. I got really tired while doing the rotation so after finishing the logs I went to bed soon after 00:00.

2003-02-09, Sun (Day 782, temperature at 08:21: 23.8°C, difference: +0.7°C): I got up at 08:00 but I stayed up from 09:33. I took the SEPTA R3 out of Swarthmore to Philadelphia to go to the art museum. I had a paper for art history due tomorrow that involved me going to the museum to see a particular work of art.

In the museum I located the painting, took a stroll around the rest of the nearby European galleries, and then returned to the painting to write down answers to the suggested questions for the essay. A number of people moved through the gallery I was in and the stools in front of the painting helped make writing more comfortable by having a place to sit down.

I left the art museum close to 15:00 so I had to walk quickly to get to the train station on time. The next train was scheduled to leave at 15:26. I got on the train five minutes before it was scheduled to depart and it took another five minutes for the train to leave.

Very hungry, I stopped in my room briefly and then went to Sharples after 16:00 to eat a large quantity of food. After dinner I composed a reading question for astronomy and then hurried to the Parrish east circle to catch the Target shuttle at 19:00. I arrived there right when the shuttle was loading and I think I took the last open seat.

I went to Target primarily to buy a new watch. My current Timex Ironman Triathlon watch went blank last night sometime after I set my alarm for later that evening. By pushing buttons I was able to get my watch to start again although the date and time reset to January 1 at 00:00.

The watch also wouldn’t respond to button presses unless I pressed the Indiglo button before each button press. As a result it was very tedious to set the time to the current hour as well as set my alarm to wake up today. My watch over the past week had been showing some signs of deterioration but Saturday night’s failure was a marked change from that morning when my watch did the timer events for the laundry without problem.

I saw what Timex models were available at the Target jewelry department. The current Ironman series didn’t look that attractive and had a higher profile than my old Ironman but the Expedition line looked nice. A number of the models including the Expedition model I bought had a digital compass, which is a useful feature for astronomy, finding my way when lost, and Feng Shui.

A disadvantage with the Expedition was that it had fewer features than my old Ironman in that it did not have chronograph lap review, a countdown automatic restart timer, and one-touch review of the alarm and chronograph screens. On my old Ironman, holding down the Start/Stop button displayed the chronograph and the Lap/Reset button displayed the alarm time. Still my new watch has a new novelty to it and the numbers are more visible since they are larger and the LCD display is more reflective. Also at Target I got Tums, clothes, and some food.

I took the 20:30 shuttle back, dropped off my stuff, and then went to Beardsley to write my art history paper due tomorrow. I found that it was relatively easy to write my paper since I had spent a good amount of time thinking about the painting at the museum. I also noticed that I used in my paper a small fraction of what I wrote down in Philadelphia.

2003-02-08, Sat (Day 781, temperature at 07:03: 23.1°C, difference: -1.1°C): I dreamed Jeremy, Kai, and I were riding up an elevator in the center of Parrish. Note that in real life Parrish does not have an elevator, just two dumbwaiters.

I ate breakfast, did the laundry this morning, ate lunch, and spent the rest of the afternoon in the CS Sun lab.

2003-02-07, Fri (Day 780, temperature at 07:01: 24.2°C, difference: +0.9°C): I woke up to an ongoing snowstorm that became quite heavy and ended later this morning. Art history class today was cancelled so I spent an extra hour in Cornell this morning working on my astronomy problem set.

I went to the 19:30 showing of “Bowling for Columbine” in Kirby. I then went to the Sun lab from about 22:00 to 23:30 to do the CS homework due tomorrow night.

2003-02-06, Thu (Day 779, temperature at 07:01: 23.3°C, difference: 0.0°C): I got up at 07:00 this time to write my environmental studies paper. I had ice cream for dinner but I needed to hurry near the end since Phoenix ed board was at 19:00.

It started snowing at about 20:30 when I was going to Cornell to start my astronomy problem set. I left Cornell at about 21:10 to go to pub night. I stayed until almost 00:00. The theme for tonight’s pub night was pole dancing but very few people partook. Later on in the evening a number of people danced normally though.

2003-02-05, Wed (Day 778, temperature at 07:00: 23.3°C, difference: +2.2°C): I dreamed I was trying to catch a taxi with a bag of food packages on a busy street. This is the first time I needed to hail a taxi. Later I saw from the outside a mall inside Veteran’s Stadium in Philadelphia. There were signs for Macy’s and Bloomingdales on the outside. On the red awning at one of the stadium entrances where the gate letter normally is located it said “MALL.”

I spent much of the afternoon beginning to optimize The Phoenix Online workflow. I started working on the simpler projects that would provide the most time saved. I first chose to use the code I wrote for trucksess.com last summer to automatically make links with page titles. I needed to make some changes to the Phoenix page templates and I also ran into some bugs but I worked them out. I tested operation on article pages, section pages, and the issue front page.

In the publications office after 17:00 I worked on getting the script that displays images for The Phoenix Online to work without needing separate files for the pop-up images. At about 20:00 the early edition went up and lots of errors appeared on the front page due to the automatic link loader. I thought the problem was an easy fix but it turned out to be more complicated. I got things working eventually. Back in the office after 22:00 I continued working on the Phoenix image script and got it working sometime later.

2003-02-04, Tue (Day 777, temperature at 07:01: 21.1°C, difference: -3.1°C): I got up at 07:00, an hour earlier than normal so I could start my astronomy lab report this morning. I worked in the early afternoon to finish the draft of my lab report and turned it in before 15:00, which is when the science center tour started. The tour this month was choppier since the mud around the site made it difficult to walk smoothly through the buildings.

The tour ended after 16:00 and I read the New York Times in my room before dinner. In Wharton center the network including the LAN went down sometime after 14:45 and remained down into the evening through Wednesday morning. The public computers around campus are now on their own AppleTalk zone so the computers in Wharton C basement still could connect to the LAN and the Internet despite being located in the physical outage area.

Astronomy lab was this evening and lasted from 20:00 to about 21:30. The coolest thing I saw this evening was the rings of Saturn through a telescope.

2003-02-03, Mon (Day 776, temperature at 08:02: 24.2°C, difference: +0.7°C): Eric Jensen baked raisin muffins for us today in astronomy to demonstrate that the universe is like a raisin muffin. I did the log rotation this afternoon and unfortunately it took too long. A robot crawled through the Phoenix Online and encountered a broken link since it had an .htmll extension. I remember first seeing this error happen when I converted .htm pages to .html in 2000 for site-wide statistics reporting. When I did a search and replace I inadvertently added the extra letter and while I thought I fixed the problem then, part of it still was there. I needed to change almost 300 pages.

I went to the publications office for a mini ed board meeting at 22:00.

2003-02-02, Sun (Day 775, temperature at 11:01: 23.5°C, difference: -0.8°C): I stayed up from 11:00 and went to lunch. Later I went to an entrepreneurship workshop by Walter Blass ’51 in the Scheuer room from 14:00 to 17:00.

I went outside midway through the evening to observe the altitude of Polaris for astronomy lab. I originally planned to do the observation from the field in front of Mertz and while I saw the North Star from there, my surroundings were too bright to get a good view. I walked across PA 320 to the Cunningham fields to get a better observation.

2003-02-01, Sat (Day 774, temperature at 08:08: 24.3°C, difference: +0.4°C): I got up at 08:00 primarily for the Southeastern Pennsylvania McCabe interviews, which started at 09:00. I went to Sharples for breakfast at 08:30 and got back to my room a few minutes before 09:00. I got dressed for the interviews and left my room a few minutes after 09:00. At about that time the U.S. space shuttle Columbia exploded upon reentry over Texas. I didn’t know about it until the early afternoon.

I left the admissions office at 15:00. After putting my journal up I went to the downstairs lounge to watch CNN to see video of what happened this morning with the shuttle.

In the late afternoon I read the New York Times and went to dinner. After doing the laundry in the evening I went to Olde Club soon after 22:00. The groups Dalek, Oddatee, and King of Prussia performed. I got back to Wharton at 02:00.

Journal 2003-01