Elbie at Trig dot Net

Thu, 22 Mar 2007

Gotta collect'em all!

This week is the appointment period for me to enroll in courses for the coming term. I was looking over courses I've taken, and courses that are available to me, and I'm vaguely reminded of choosing skills for a character in a role playing game. Particularly of Kingdom of Loathing where after you "ascend" you can pick a skill from your current game to keep permanently in all future games with that character.

In any event, I ended up settling on PMath345 for the Spring term. Only one course this time around, though I suspect it will be challenging enough that it will keep me busy. Not nearly as much so as CO355 did.

In the meantime, yes, I'm still insanely busy with my courses this term. Japanese, in particular is demanding an insane amount of my time, and I'm just barely passing it this time around. The test last night went better than I would have expected, but that's not to say that I think I did particularly well. We shall see.

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Sun, 18 Mar 2007

Oh Lord, won't you buy me a colour TV.

Well, things continue to be insanely busy for me these days, especially with school. I suppose that's to be expected, really.

I'd been considering buying a new desktop for a long while. My Mini-ATX machine has been doing largely well enough, but it's a bit underpowered for the most current generation of PC games. Most games now were really made for PCI-Express graphics cards, which are simply too big to fit into the Mini-ATX case. I've been content to wait for a while, wanting to replace my TV, which I busted over New Year's. I've been having some rotten luck lately, with a lot of things only partially working. That gets pretty frustrating, when you want to watch TV, for example, and you can, but there's some serious discolouration going on with the picture. Or if you want to use your computer, but you have to wait five minutes for it to actually turn on after you press the power button.

When the power supply on my desktop died on me, it sort of changed my priorities a bit. It was mostly just an excuse to go ahead and spend a lot of money, really, but it's certainly nicer to have my computer just work for a change. I am the proud owner of a brand new Mac Pro. It's pretty sweet. One of the first things I did, when I got it was to download Boot Camp and make a WinXP partition so I could in fact play the games I want to play. I was pretty impressed with Boot Camp. It made the install and set-up of WinXP surprisingly effortless.

In the meantime, however, I'm going to have to hold off on the new TV.

Update: This Friday's PVP seems rather apropos.

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Mon, 05 Mar 2007

Nothing's wounded, except my pride... Oh, and my ass.

I was very tired and stressed when I last posted almost a month ago. But I did indeed make it to Thursday. And a few weeks beyond that as well, so here I am.

That week, I had an assignment (handed in only mostly completed), and a midterm in both my courses (passed CO350 with flying colours, and nearly failed, squeaking by in Japan201). I was feeling much better after that. Plus, the following week was Reading Week here, and I booked a couple of days vacation from work, so I had a chance to relax somewhat.

Only somewhat. Reading week was still busy with work, as it was the best time to reboot a horde of machines that presumably the faculty and students wouldn't be using. This whole Daylight Savings switchover thing was such a pain in the ass.

So speaking of my ass, I managed to spectacularly fall down a friend's stairwell last weekend. It was a narrow little winding stairwell, and my feet slipped on the carpeting and I landed really hard, so I now have a fist-size very dark bruise on my bum cheek. (It's still there after over a week.) Apparently, it was quite the thing to see. (Uh, the fall, not my ass. My ass is not for you.)

I'm also still in pain from this weekend. The inclement weather meant that school was closed on Friday, and I managed to go climbing for the first time in two months with some friends, and I'm achy all over from that as well.

Anyway, it's back to status quo now, with work and school. Work as per normal, classes and studying and being constantly over my head with assignments as per normal. So yeah. Remind me again, why I thought two courses in a term plus full time work was manageable?

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