Category: Uncategorized

Does it count as a birthday party if you would have done it anyway?

Closest things I have have to birthday parties planned or already occurred for this year: Hosting Monday night dinner group (last night), board game night at my place (Wednesday, note, actual birthday), presumed Thursday night at MadMex on the northside while I and many others are in Pittsburgh for spring carnival (it’s been an annual tradition for awhile now).

I always wanted someone to throw me a surprise birthday party, but never have had anyone I would trust to manage the invite list. Maybe I have a secret control freak hidden deep inside sabotaging this plan. =)

I’m standing inside a large room with artificial lighting, connected to open hallways with no view of the outside. It resembles the underground tunnels that riddle the University of Minnesota campus, or certain corridors from the hospital where my father worked. I am talking with the professor who gave me the C+ I earned, after she set us up to fail and another anonymous figure. The Berkeley professor I have an academic crush on shows up. We are discussing my future. I express uncertainty as to what I want to do. My academic crush chastises me, saying that was why he didn’t let me in. Rage boils over inside me.

This Thursday afternoon/evening I’ll be flying out to Pittsburgh for nerd homecoming^W^WSpring Carnival*.

Two weeks from tomorrow, I fly out to DC primarily for work purposes, but my Wednesday evening has already been claimed. Depending on various work things, this trip may get extended.

The first week in May (5/2-5/10), I’ll be heading out to SF for my usual two weekends+the week in between specials.

*=I came up with this shorthand, which amuses me greatly, when having to explain it to two romantic connections who have no connection to CMU. Booth, buggy, and bot requires too much explanation, but does form an amusing parallel to guns, gays, and god.

Up by 6:15, had a bowl of oatmeal first thing, paid my credit card debt down to $0.00 (might even last a day or two), and hitting the gym.

I wonder if I ever would have predicted this life for me. =)

In the spirit of unreservedly positive posts, I’d like to say okcupid is a wonderful service. It is free, it has amusing multiple choice tests to take, it’s reliable, it has a neat personality compatability prediction system, which seems to have worked well for me, and I’ve met several neat guys through it, including Chip and Pliny.

I recommend it.

On Friday, I told the person in charge of such things that I want a san fran transfer to the team with the focus closest to my areas of interest, some time in august or september. There is a new person in those shoes since my abortive transfer to seattle. I wonder if/when I will hear back.

On a totally unrelated note, it’s nice that CTA wants the hearing impaired to be able to hear messages over the rattling of the heavy trains on their dilapidated rails, but it be nice if they didn’t pump the volume up high enough to create more hearing impaired people.

Thirdly, Pliny noted that I seem to focus on the negative quite a bit. Pretty accurate. I’m thinking about making myself post something positive, every day, and then, hardest of all, not qualify it. Maybe. We’ll see.

Is now down below $1,000 for the first time in many years. If it’s not gone by next paycheck (two weeks) that’ll be because I prepurchased flights for all summer to lock in low prices and it’ll be gone by the payday after.

w00t, I say, w00t.

I got a new pci wireless card for my ubuntu desktop (D-Link WDA-1320). Ubuntu support sites identified it as a "works out of the box" card. And as soon as I remembered that my roommate/network admin uses hardware address authentication, I was indeed able to get an IP address. A little playing around with settings and I could even ssh to an old account from my undergrad days, though it is ass slow. But no other network connections seem to be working. I can ping just about anywhere with no major problems (except an occasional message about a wrong data byte). But firefox keeps timing out, and downloading new drivers doesn’t seem to work at all. It’s about 2 out of 4 bars (and hovers around 50% on what I’m guessing is signal strength) on the wireless control panel.

Looking at the card itself, the activity and power lights are blinking in sync. That almost helps it make sense. I’d be willing to throw good money after bad to get a wireless card that gave me none of these headaches.

I don’t know why I thought getting steel cut oats was a good idea. Especially now that I clearly see they take like 3 times as long to cook as regular rolled oats. They’re still just oats. It’s not worth the 10 cents I saved. Learn from my mistake. =)

It’s really annoying to me that my noise cancelling headphones are also high quality cell phone signal receivers. Such that I can’t use my own cell phone for t3h intarwebz or even ride the train in noise-cancelled peace without the deeply unpleasant noisiness of my or others’ usually silent mobile phone chatter disrupting. Bleh.