Am I glad to see you.

Long story short, yet another disadvantage of un-air-conned server rooms is that if you don't shut the windows and it rains over lunch, it can rain on the equipment. But so far as I can tell, things seem okay (there is internet, the lights on the wired routers are flashing, and my Moodle server has booted to the login screen).

So that was fun. But I was very glad not to have been the last person out of the building before lunch (so the fact that I usually don't shut the windows when I leave for lunch was not an issue), and very, VERY glad to see the polkaspots login screen.

Me.

My really-not-at-all-boss (who nevertheless is the person with the clearest ideas for what I'm supposed to be doing here) has told me that he wants the Network Operations Center to look futuristic, science-fictional, like a space ship. Because what LinkNet, what Macha Works, is doing here is as much about the idea of what technology can be in Zambia, as any of the actual implementations.

So my question to you is, what does the future look like right now? If you had a huge budget, how would you build something that looks like a space ship? What about a modest budget?

( crazy convention dream behind the cut )

And three nights ago, I dreamed about accidental time travelers to WWI. I wasn't actually a time traveler, more of a techie working the net or whatever, but for some reason I couldn't pull them out yet. I was also in contact with future-now, but at the same time I could talk and interact with the WWI people (one of whom was a love interest finally goaded into declaring his feelings by the prospect of being drafted). I think I was sort-of simultaneously in WWI-time and future-now, but only in that one spot?

I do not approve of Miss Eliza's new habit of sometimes shutting down without warning when she has less than 20 minutes of battery left. That time I definitely still had 19 minutes; I was paying attention! At least lj auto-saves these days.


Edit: Also? The restaurant menu, while it had a very fancy layout, was printed on newsprint, which was just folded and taped to the tablecloth (so it didn't blow away). Real linen tablecloth, white. Newsprint menu.

I have an archeology paper due tomorrow, which I wrote over the weekend (hooray for foresight and willpower!), but didn't get around to editing and proofreading until this morning (not-so-hooray for willpower), and which it occurred to me that it will be difficult to print tomorrow before class, because I have bookbinding all morning. And I still haven't figured out if the computer lab is ever open in the afternoons, and I was worried that the printing lady wouldn't show up this morning before I had to go to class. But I arrived, and she was there, and there was no line, and in exchange for six centimos, I now have three pages of archeology paper (saying that makes it sound like a better bargain than it was, though; I still had to write the arheology paper, remember).

Voice lesson in half an hour. I'm going to try to get a little nano done before going over the words to the song again. Or maybe I'll just read my flist.

The hard drive was too dead to get anything off of it. Really all I've lost is the pictures I've taken since I got to Spain (and I have so-so to good copies of a few of them). Everything else got backed up before I left home.

What I find really annoying, though, is the fact that I will be doing without most of my iTunes library for the next three months.


. . . and Spain seems to not believe in cheap, portable surge protectors. So far everything I've seen costs between 80 and 120 euros, and is Very Large.

I officially take back anything bad I ever said about Pharos and the Pay-for-Print system.

Okay, that's a lie. I still think that it isn't intuitive (it's easy, but it isn't intuitive; you have to teach almost everyone how to use it the first time), and that when it goes screwy, you've got some interesting problems, and the fact that there aren't printer-card/OneCard-money machines in the printing labs is annoying, but it's so much better than it could be.


. . . You've perhaps guessed that I've had my first experience printing here.

And, in it's favor, it could be a lot worse. It isn't hard, and it isn't expensive (2 centimos per page, which is less than 3 cents, and if you get a card it's slightly cheaper still), and my camera-memory-stick-cum-zip-drive works just fine. HOWEVER. The entire system appears to be run by one woman, who isn't always there, and probably has another job too, and I haven't a clue what the hours of the lab are (never mind her hours; not even her fellow coworker seemed to know when she would be back) - and something that one of the other girls said makes me suspect that they are odd somehow. On the plus side, you can pay with change or with a card (the cards are little paper things like your tenth-cup is free deal from a cafe, or like the cafeteria at my high school), but it just seems so WEIRD to me that I can't just go and print at any point during the computer lab's hours. I was only waiting there for 30 or 40 minutes, but when I told Sonia (former Smith AMS student; is from Córdoba; I ran into her in the lab) that I had an hour and fourty-five minutes before my class, she gave me a sort of well-you'd-better-hope-that's-enough look. And did I mention that there was a line? A short line, but still.

I will say that what I saw of the lab appeared to be less ancient than the classroom support equipment. Which is to say, the computers were somewhat shiny; I brought my laptop (in case the flash drive didn't work) and so didn't actually use them.

Well, I suppose things like this are the reason that I'm in Spain.

On the whole this has been a really nice week. The beginning of it was really crazy, such that I very much needed a Rally Day, but once I got through Tuesday afternoon I realized that I was more-or-less on top of everything that needed to be done, and that I had time to breathe, and maybe even sit with friends for a while and just laugh, or go out and play in the snow, or watch a movie (and lose my cell phone and then luckily find it again without too much trouble). Which isn't to say that I don't have things to do. Because I have lots of things to do, and several items on my long-term to-do list probably still won't get done - but I'm no longer feeling so overwhelmed that I'm just running from thing to thing to thing and tiring myself out so much that I'm no longer using my time effectively and just get frustrated.
It's a really nice feeling.
I do, however, need to stop staying up until midnight if I can't get properly fulfilling sleep past 7:30 in the morning (although it should be noted that I slept in the whole way until 9:30 on Wednesday), because I like having the full eight-and-a-half-or-nine.

On the subject of other less pleasing trends, there have been several times over the past week-and-a-half when then inability to deal with people has been worse than it's ever been. On the plus side these have also coincided with times than I have been to tired and not gotten enough sleep the night before, but I can't always get enough sleep, and it's distressing when the dining hall is so busy that I feel like I can't function. It doesn't seem terribly apparent to anyone else, which I suppose is a good thing, but I'd much prefer it to not happen at all.


In cheerful news, the shiny laptop is officially Miss Eliza Tudor.

That's the good news.

The bad news:
I had to wipe her hard drive in order to do it (maybe I didn't, but in the choice between wiping the hard drive and getting her up and running, and not wiping the hard drive and hoping that I could pay some computer-adept person to copy everything, I decided that my files weren't that important and that I wanted this issue over with badly enough to lose some data. Plus, I remembered copying a bunch of stuff to Mandy, the second hard drive.

The good news:
I did back-up to Mandy.

The bad news:
I apparently did so in March.
And only copied my pictures at the time.
This is annoying.

The good news:
Some of my more recent pictures are in Facebook. And I didn't take all that many pictures last semester. And I'm sure I could get ellipa to send me more copies of the ones she gave me - in fact, I might be able to find the original CDs.

The other news:
Thinking back on what I had in March, even if I'd saved everything, it wouldn't have done much, because the not-picture things that I would like to have were, for the most part, not on Lucinda in March.

And in annoying news, Lucinda doesn't want to play nice with the firewire cable, so I'm using the memory stick from my camera with its USB connector. It holds 2gigs, but copying pictures is still going to take forever. And I'm wary of turning Lucinda off before I have a copy of all the data I could save safely stored on the laptop that might be Miss Eliza Tudor.


Also, I spent far too much time this afternoon chasing a handwritten invoice (for $500) through layers of beaurocracy so that the president of ceramics club could get her money back, despite the objections of the student bank. That *will* go though, however. I have an e-mail from the disbursements office to prove it.

And homework? What's that? It's a good thing that I've decided to give up procrastination for Lent, because the way I've been going today I won't have time to breathe for a week. The ECC dinner was yummy, and I had fun cooking, and my not-enough-time-spent, not-my-mother's-creamed-spinach actually tasted surprisingly like my mother's. Also the pancakes were excellent.

And in more bad news: my 2gig memory stick seems to thing that it only has about 30mb of free space. This is very puzzling, frustrating, and way too much work for this hour of the night. I give up on copying data; Lucinda will still be here in the morning.

But to repeat the good news: Lucinda is ALIVE, and I can cross fixing my computer off of my to-do list.

It's very shiny.

Also it needs a name.







I am not going to spend all afternoon playing with the computer . . . I will be good. I will play with the computer until lunch, and then I will do my homework and assorted errands . . . and then I will play with the computer some more.


And did I mention that this purchase was the most money I've ever spent at one time in my life?

One way or another, I will own a computer that works by the end of today.

It this means that I have to buy a new laptop online, so be it.

Today was the first day of classes. I like Calc III and Specfic so far, and if my Spanish class looks likely to be boring, at least it won't be too difficult (considering that the syllabus contains fewer writing assignments than my class last semester, that there isn't as much material to be read, that none of it is in medieval Spanish (I'm to be excited because this material wasn't written for people with English as a first language. Um, last semester in Spanish I was reading medieval treatises on love; the semester before that I read several moderately difficult plays, the semester before that was a washout (with this professor), and senior year of highschool we read Cronica de una Muerte Anunciada, which is a novel (a short novel, but Chronicle of a death foretold can be difficult in English)) and did I mention that the short story I'm to read for Wednesday is one that I read junior year of highchool, and was, in fact, one of the less challenging stories we read that year. Well, it's a required class, and if it isn't challenging, hey, I can use a not-challenging class next semester.

Yesterday was bittersweet. It was sort of slow and lazy, tying up loose ends of things to be done before classes started. I enjoyed that, and making the snow labyrinth on Seelye lawn was a lot of fun (even if it was cold). On the other hand, I learned of several bad things that have happened to people I care about, and that was sad, although more because I feel bad for them than because I'm personally affected. Shift sign-up was boring, but I survived and got most of the shifts I wanted.

This afternoon I'm going to a workshop on raku, which is a specfic type of glaze firing. It's a two-day workshop; I think that today will be spent making things to fire.