Catching up
OK. Here goes.
This coming weekend is the Gateway Men’s Chorus holiday show, which we’re doing with an interim director who’s rather good but who is probably feeling a bit overwhelmed by some of the poor habits that were tolerated by prior directors. (for example, I don’t know half the material and the show opens in 50 hours. Awesome.) Thanks to a schedule conflict this’ll be our last show for a while, and though we both enjoy singing we’re both ready for the hiatus.
This coming week is also finals in my two classes. I don’t anticipate any trouble with either one, though the programming final is going to cut into the department holiday party (which is shaping up to be rather epic). At least the physio final is done online.
Work? Rocks. Today, for example, I got to play with the degausser; disassemble a “legacy” box attached to an important piece of lab equipment; use a badass air compressor to remove the dust from said legacy box; discuss a large project with the school netadmin; and wrangle Mailman and Postfix for a departmental mailing list server. And through all of this, no stupid user questions!
Had a retirement party for the department’s glass washer last week. It was odd to have a very large table full of finger foods, even well into the party, and to have a cooler of beer and soda just sitting out for anybody. (BTW, when you use as many glass Petri dishes and glass flasks and glass beakers and glass test tubes as these labs do, you really do need to have at least a half-time position just to keep it all sparkling clean.)
Buying a car for Fred. (He already knows; in fact, he picked it out.) Once the papers get signed and the financing stuff worked out (hopefully tomorrow) we’ll be trading in his Ford for a sleek used BMW that is similar in vintage and mileage but that is in much, much, much better shape. An eventual project: a car PC to go in that cavernous trunk.
Another project, but much more urgent: replace the home file server with something smaller and quieter and more efficient. The GHz-or-so box we have now does the job, but it’s big and noisy and overpowered for what we use it for, though it is contributing nicely to my BOINC stats. I’m eyeing a Kurobox to replace. (This discussion will get its own post, as it’s too in-depth to cover here.)
Stuck in my head right now is Rufus Wainwright’s “Going to a Town“, which rather succinctly encapsulates my current feelings towards a certain political movement.
While I have the chance, I need to plug Portable Firefox. I’ve been using it on my USB flash drive for almost two months now, and I don’t know how I can use campus computer lab boxen anymore without it. The idea with PFF (and, by extension, other portable apps) is that, once you install it on your USB flash drive (or iPod etc.), you can then use it on any Windows PC with all your preferences and bookmarks and saved passwords and such intact. It’s a good solution for those of us who have to use public or semipublic computers or who aren’t always at the same PC (and let’s face it, a flash drive is a hell of a lot cheaper than a laptop). And yes, there are similar packages for Mac users too.
Just passed a young male undergrad, around 18 or 19, with a Fu Manchu, and it did not work on his boyish face with his short hair. Though I realize that college is a time for experimentation and everything, there are some freshman experiments that need to be halted quickly, and bad scruff is at the top of the list. It’s tempting sometimes to roam the campus with a razor in one hand and a bullhorn in the other, shouting “YOU! SHAVE! NOW!” at inappropriately fuzzy boys.
Gotta go. Discussing reproduction in physiology.
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