Sick again. But I went to the Career Fair, and had an interview with the guy from Rockwell Collins. More details when I feel better.
While browsing Slashdot, I came across this:
Homeland Security Agents Visit Toystore
Yeppers. It's the most dangerous thing around. A cheap Rubik's Cube knock-off. I feel so much safer now that I know they're enforcing expired patents.
Oooh. And I want one of these.
I, in my infinite wisdom, signed up for an extra three-hour shift at the end of my first three-hour shift at the labs today. So I'm working from 6pm to midnight.
First things first. The huge amount of homework Mr. Erickstad gave me to grade over break.
*grades calculus word problems busily*
*three hours pass*
*still grading calculus word problems busily*
And I thought I was going to be so bored here in the labs.
*continues grading for another 1.5 hours*
There. All done. And nobody got a perfect score. I would feel sorry for the little blokes, but it took me far too long to grade their homework.
As a side note, why is it that people find the littlest things to get all in a tizzy over? I think I'm going back to my 'most people don't like looking at big pictures' mindset. Because they don't. Not really. Most people I encounter spend far more time worrying over little things than the big ones. I suppose it's easier that way. I'm sure I think that way a lot myself.
But lately I've been forced to start thinking about the big picture (read: "My Future"; alternately replace with: "My Family's Future"), and so I get a trifle annoyed when I see people deciding to not talk to each other because they had a petty altercation.
Instead, everyone should just get along, join hands, and sing 'Kum-ba-yah'.
Or failing that, take their pent-up anger and frustration out on the local fire ants.
And now, after this brief mental detour, back to your regularly scheduled 'Diary of a Lab Rat'...
...having finished her mountain of grading, Ardith pressed on towards the Microprocessors take-home quiz. This involved much writing down of assembly code and hexadecimal addresses, and made her very happy. Which only goes to show how warped she really is.
*finishes take-home quiz*
Only 15 minutes left. I really hope it's not still raining outside.
And now that I've changed from first person to third person and back, it's time to end this post. Before I convince even myself that I'm crazy.
*deletes twenty gajillion comment spams*
I'm gonna have to do something about that again. What, I'm not sure. But I don't like part of my morning routine being clicking 'delete' over and over again.
I've been busy lately. Doing all sorts of random things. Fer instance, here's today's list:
-Go to work
-Work on lab report at work
-Go to chapel
-Eat lunch
-Go to class
-Fix Kate's mom's computer
-Maybe go shopping at Goodwill
-Eat some sort of dinner
-Watch Smallville
-Do homework for tomorrow
-Work on resume for next week's career fair
-Set up some sort of organized file-sharing scheme between Windows and Linux on my computer
-Set up Samba again
-Download and burn Knoppix ISO
-Play with video conversion
-Play with TV tuner card in Linux
All sorts of stuff like that. Although the last 5 or so are mostly wishful thinking at this stage. But I must leave for work now. May your day not consist of piranhas falling from the sky.
While looking up random things, I ran across this:
Quantum Entanglement Library for Perl
And then I found this:
Quantum Superposition Library for Perl
I think I should install these packages, just to say I did.
Now that the cold is gone, we enter the 'Ice cream makes Ardith cough' stage for the next couple of months. I shall have to find a new favorite random dessert.
You know, just when I think I'm having a good weekend, life rears its ugly little head up again, and says: "Hah. Eat this, sucker!"
And so my dad's in the hospital unexpectedly again. Details here. Yes, for those who want to know, it is really scary to know that your dad could have died all of a sudden. But life goes on. I got the papers graded for Monday, and I managed to have a really great time over the weekend since I didn't know what was going on.
I think I'm going to go find a totally mindless game to play now.
Mmm-hmm. No sleep for Ardith tonight. She's going to try and catch up on the assignments she's still behind on after being sick all last week.
w00t. The Statistics students seem to have a test tomorrow, so I won't have to grade homework over the weekend.
Weekend. I like weekends. But they need to be three days long. Seriously. No sooner do I get into my "Ah, it's Friday, and I'm going to enjoy this weekend" mood, but it magically becomes Sunday evening and I have to do homework again. And all of a sudden, it's almost halfway through the semester.
It's a good thing Fall Break is coming up. I think I'm going to spend it all sitting in my room, playing games, doing homework, and watching movies. Being anti-social and reclusive. But mostly not going anywhere, and not doing anything important. Maybe I can even catch up on the books I bought but haven't got around to reading yet.
Maybe... hah. And you thought I couldn't ramble on anymore. It's nice and quiet around here right now; everyone's asleep, except for me, and I think I'm hitting my second wind. Or maybe it's just the Mountain Dew kicking in.
Ever since my mom and sister started blogging, I've been wondering why I've taken to it so well. They've always been the writers, after all. Not me.
I hated writing with a passion in highschool. I could never make what I wrote anything beyond the stilted sentences that still make up most of my research papers. Oh, it's grammatically correct, and even reads fairly well. But the creation process is like pulling teeth. Not like this, where I can write nearly as fast as the thoughts come. And oddly enough, they do come. I think better when I've written something out. The same sort of thing can happen when I talk a subject out. Which might be why most of my random thoughts take the form of internal conversations. Re-hashing past events, coming up with alternate ways of dealing with a situation, trying to calculate the odds of putting the next assignment off making me go insane later when trying to finish it at the last minute. All sorts of things.
I guess they're not always internal conversations, per say. Quite often it's like video editing. Or making spreadsheets in your head. I'm forever trying to connect things together in my head; like the world is a giant puzzle, and if I turn the pieces around enough, and try enough different combinations, it'll all fall into place.
Except somebody dropped the puzzle and lost about 20 of the pieces. And thus we have Ardith's Description of Why Life Does Not Make Sense. Clever, no?
Keys.
I have six keys now; keys to my apartment and campus mailbox; two keys for the car, a house key from home that lets me in at 2am if I so desire, and a key to the computer labs. Because I'm trusted around 50+ computers.
Working for IT is interesting. All my hours this semester are lab shifts; 3 in the morning, and then another 3-hour shift one evening a week. Plus whatever extra shifts I take up for people who can't make it. But the labs are actually interesting most of the time. Dude. I get to sit in front of a computer and get paid for it. How great is that?
And I keep the printers full of paper, and answer the phone, and answer questions from people who walk in, and just act generally helpful. Which I seem to be able to do fairly well. I haven't had anyone actually get upset with me over the phone yet.
Oooh. Almost 3am. And another assignment almost done.
I may actually get to sleep tonight; I hadn't planned on that, so it's a nice surprise.
I don't like the way the Software Engineering book smells.
*begins writing 1-page software document*
*takes 20-minute catnap*
Yeah, vocabulary is one of the first things to go after missing a lot of sleep. It's a little after 4am now, and I'm starting to have trouble remembering which word I'm trying to use. Development. Yes. That's the word I was looking for. Wait, no. I just used that one in the last sentence. And the thesaurus is no help, because it doesn't think in IT-documentation-speak. Implemented. That's it.
Oooh. It's 5:30. Time for a 3-hour nap.
I'm forever forgetting how stupid Windows is. See, I had this unformatted 55GB partition that I wanted to start sorting all my games and data onto. Obviously, I needed to format it first. You'd think that they'd make that easy in XP, wouldn't you?
Well, they do. As long as you want a NTFS filesystem.
But I don't. I want a FAT32 filesystem. It makes my life easier when sharing files between Windows and Linux.
But back to the story. I try to access the partition, and XP helpfully tells me I need to format it first. And then brings up the little GUI for formatting the partition. Which is all well and good, except for the fact that it'll only allow me to create a NTFS filesystem. So I dig around for awhile, find the command-line format program, and am now happily creating a FAT32 filesystem, just like I wanted.
So much for progress. I miss MS-DOS.
EDIT: Huh. Seems like it had a valid reason for not wanting to format to FAT32 after all. I forgot about the 32GB partition-size limit. Yay for my inherent distrust of GUI front-ends.
*makes two partitions*
*formats them happily*
Yeppers. Sanity still does come before taking fun classes. So I'm dropping World Lit. Through Film.
I'm finally basically over being sick; I only lost about a week out of my semester. Which is quite enough for me.
Tonight, I'm not going to wax eloquent on why the class I really wanted to drop was Software Engineering.
Nope. Instead you get a random and vaguely amusing limerick:
There was a bright llama from Denver,
Who wanted to see and discover;
He looked at a rock,
And measured a block,
That incredibly bright llama from Denver.