Published on Sunday, August 24, 2008 .
Today I read a book. It was glorious.
Not so much the book, actually, it was just ‘ok’, but the hour-ish it took to turn the pages while trying to find the most comfortable position on my bed was pure bliss. It’s been more than a month since I got to enjoy gaming and much, much longer since I got to read for pleasure. I have only this short week to soak up literature of my choosing before the fall semester starts and pleasure reading potentially falls by the wayside again. During this last summer session I took a break from programming classes and took a political science elective: Global Media: Trends and Transformation. We covered every chapter in International Communication Continuity And Change (Daya Kishan Thussu) and it was actually dryer than my C text. How depressing, eh? At least the supplementary readings were interesting and varied though doing my final project on human rights in China had a predictable and foreseeable negative effect on my happiness that week. On the plus side, my discipline in focuses only on that one course should net me slight GPA boost since I rocked the final exam to go with my 88% midterm and 84% project.
Now that my room is completely unpacked and good to go for the year ahead* I have been slowly decompressing from my previous stressful state by kicking back with Lego Indiana Jones and sleeping a great deal. My summer room had only a tiny twin mattress and I was too cheap to buy new sheets for it so I carefully arranged and folded my ancient spongebob sheets on it as best I could. Now that I’m back up to a double I’m finding that I have too much room and I don’t know what to do with myself at night! I’m pretty sure I’ll adjust again, real quick-like :)
In order to not starve until we get the key issue sorted out I managed to prop a door open around 3am and duck out for light groceries. I had a few cups of rice left and chocolate milk powder, lots of varied tea flavours and some power bars. Now I’ve also got a loaf of whole wheat bread, PB+J, milk, vector, strawberries and nachos even though I forgot to grab some salsa.
*ok, so I still have to wash the dishes I have left but I lack a dishrack as well as the ability to leave the building until Tuesday, so it can wait. All the RA’s are off-campus for training, res services doesn’t open until Monday (and are not often the most prompt of departments here) and none of us early birds here have keycards that work on our rooms or the building. Psh, who needs to go outside on a beautiful summer day, right? We try to prop doors open or arrange with people to let us back in but it’s a giant miss so far with everyone else going out and me staying here to hold down the fort. More time to read and game and sleep, I guess!
Published on Friday, August 22, 2008 .
whew. I survived the move! Then I slept for a few hours. Now I’m writing this. Granted, I only had to carry everything I owned down 3 flights of stairs and across the streets but I definitely learned something. I haven’t unpacked yet since I have an exam in less than an hour but I did get my PC setup and nearly gave myself a heart attack in the process. I am always super nervous when I have to move computers. There are hundreds of little things that can go wrong outside of the big stuff like, oops, dropping the PC and then it gets run over by a 16-wheeler and then it rains and the parts get hit by lightning!!!
Fine, that doesn’t happen every day but it could.
Once I figured out how I wanted to move around the furniture in my new room (hint: I didn’t. I just pushed apart the desk and drawers a little bit to make room for my huge PC tower and makeshift stand on the floor. If I put it on the desk I wouldn’t be able to see out my window) it was time to hook up my trusty tank. I also took this opportunity to bust out the can of compressed air to take care of any dust bunnies and open up the case to check if anything came unseated during transit. Everything looked peachy keen and now it was clean so it was boot time! No boot. Hmm. Check everything again, make sure the switch at the back is in the right position and press again. We have life! Oh? What’s this? What do you mean I have no keyboard? The G15 is sitting on my desk, I can see it. On boot 3 I make it to my desktop. It can’t find my Habu mouse and pressing any key on my G15 resets the machine (this accounts for boots 4-6 before I figured that out). I stop and realize I am going in circles. Looking at the two USB slots I have at the back of the unit I realize that they are not in their usual positions. I switch them back to the spots they are ‘used to’ and lucky boot number 7 is a complete success. Weird. I should care more but I’m just glad it’s all back to normal and I can pump the tunes post-exam and get drunk.
I’m kidding. Drinking alone in an empty building is probably a bad sign. I’m gonna bust out the gatorade and maybe some Dr.Pepper and unpack!! It’s always exciting to me to arrange things in a new place. This is a much smaller room than I’ve had in the past so I will definitely need to be creative here. Stupid exam taking precious time away from my fun ;)
Published on Thursday, August 21, 2008 .
So I’ve been a big ball of GET OUT OF MY WAY I’M BUSY lately since I have my exam tomorrow night and, thanks to a phone call at 8:20am this morning, it turns out I move in less than 24 hours. Nice notice, eh?
I knew that the school’s res services would want me out of here sooner rather than later but I never figured they’d have me move before my final exam. So that was a bit of a rude wake up call. Most of the boxes I moved here with disintegrated ages ago so I went and picked up another rubbermaid-style container to carry what didn’t fit into my original two. I can cram my clothes into my suitcase so that’s no worry, carry my linen + quilt over myself, and probably give away a bunch of dishes. See, I was one of the few people that cooked and baked in residence (usually a pain since there’s only one stove for the whole building) so when I moved into a townhouse for the summer with some other students they weren’t quite prepared to eat in the absence of a meal plan. They also weren’t prepared to treat my stuff with care so outside of the dishes I kept in my room everything else has a chip or a crack or just plain walked away. I should be more upset but my baking stuff and my big pot are ok, at least. And a good friend and I are going dish shopping next time I head back to Toronto so that’ll be fun (albeit expensive since I’m getting better stuff this time and no one else but my roommate can touch it ^_^)!
Anyway, in better news I should stop overly worrying about my exam right about now. I read and re-read the text cover to cover. I went over all my notes. I listened to the one lecture I missed on mp3 thanks to a recording from a classmate. And after sending a somewhat curt letter to the prof he finally told me my project mark: 84. I got an 88 on the midterm and these were both worth 60%. So I can not show up to the exam and still get the credit. Of course, that would be an extremely poor decision! I like my GPA and I want it even higher so I will still do prep for the exam essay question as best I can. For now, though, back to packing. On the weekend: an older video I forgot to release.
Published on Tuesday, August 19, 2008 .
Man, it’s so close it’s killing me. Also killing me is the fact that the prof has yet to tell us how we did on our projects! The whole Global Media (Political Science, an elective) course is based entirely on three things. The midterm was worth 30%, the project another 30% and Friday’s final exam will be worth 40%. I scored 88% on the midterm and only one person beat me by 2%. While that’s all well and good I want to know where I stand so I have a better clue about how much sleep I’m going to lose before the final. With the Olympics going on my hours are all over the place and I’m lucky the exam is an evening one. I sent the prof an e-mail yesterday asking when we’ll receive our project marks that he promised he’d have ‘a few days’ after the end of the course. I know profs generally hate those type of e-mails but, too bad, it’s been more than a few days now :(
I feel a little stressed right now since I was so unproductive yesterday. I mean, I did a lot of stuff but it wasn’t study-related. I took a 2 hour nap in the sun, found out there was something wrong with my credit card and managed to get it fixed without tearing out all my hair or going broke, found some $4 s-video cables I needed, I figured out how to output through said s-video cables to my Canon XL2 , then had to use a ridiculous plethora of tricks to get colour output since it was reverting to black and white cause SCART is stupid, and I was gonna start figuring out how to record sound from my newly-split PC output on the XL2 while in VCR mode but I was rapt watching the amazing triathlon last night and then decided to try and sleep.
On a related note, I do not like when classes require you to go out and find papers that aren’t available in the library or handed out as course material. Yes, research is an important skill and absolutely vital when you are writing papers that require at least 5 scholarly sources but I get annoyed when the whole class has to fight to get their hands on the single copy the prof places in the office for us. I’d gladly pay a little extra at the bookstore for a courseware pack in order to avoid this headache every single week. This also makes review at the end a serious pain when you want to reread stuff and the articles go missing. GAH. I want it to be Friday.
Published on Sunday, August 17, 2008 .
