For obvious reasons, I can’t get “Pomp and Circumstance” out of my head.
Da… da da da, da… da. Da…. da da da, da.
Whirlwind graduation tour – Part Two
The nice thing about sleeping back home is that I don’t have to set an alarm, I just tell my mom to wake me. I know that if I get up after the second time she comes it and tells me it’s time to wake up, that gives me just enough time to do my morning thing and be ready at the same time as everyone else.
It’s a good thing, too, because I was awoken at 6:30 a.m. Sunday morning. As the designated driver, I got to drive the three of us to UCLA in my mom’s car, with my Uncle and Aunt in the car behind us. The trip was uneventful, except for the fact that I got to see some of the construction projects that had been started when I was still living in SoCal actually finished (the 57/91 interchange and the 5/91 interchange) along with some brand new construction. We manage to only make about one wrong turn that was easily correctable, drive past Scott and pick him up off of the street, park the car, and walk to the open field where his graduation is going to take place. We get there a little after 8am for the ceremony that starts at 10am. UCLA’s commencements are a bit more like Berkeley’s than UCR’s, though. They split it up by school/department, and have multiple ceremonies in multiple places over the course of a few days. We attended the Physical Sciences ceremony of the College of Letters and Science, which was large enough that the Chancellor attended. The stark contrast of the students, not to mention the crowd, compared to UCR’s ceremony was striking. Where I felt overdressed on Saturday, I definitely felt underdressed on Sunday, and I was wearing nicer pants on Sunday (heh)! There were quite a few more Doctorates, nowhere near as many Masters Degrees, and a fraction of the Bachelor’s Degrees. The difference that allowed us to be done in an hour an a half was that they didn’t actually walk across the stage. The Doctorates got hooded individually, but everyone else just stood up in place were recognized as a group.
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Whirlwind graduation tour
Here comes another long one… my weekend. I went down to Southern California for a variety of reasons which will become apparent as the weekend unfolds in this entry.
I could start at Friday night, with Friday Night Magic, but that was a typical Friday. The fun really began Saturday morning at 9am.
Waking up at 9am is sort of early for me, but bearable. But having to wake myself up, “pack” (I only had to bring enough clothes for one night and my toiletries), and get to the airport. Of course, I forgot I had to get gas first, so by the time I got to the airport, I was running late enough that I didn’t want to risk missing my flight and parked in short term parking instead of long term parking. It was only going to be for about 30 hours so it wouldn’t be that bad. I am one of the last to check in, but I make it before the 5 minute rule (yay Southwest).
On the flight I try to play some GBA Castlevania, but the amount of time that you get on the 50 minute flight that isn’t ascent or decent and they aren’t serving drinks is about 15 minutes, so I didn’t get much in. That, and the whole light issue made it hard to play. Also, I felt very weird, as the young woman who was sitting next to me was sobbing uncontrollably (and unapproachably) for most of the flight. I never found out why, but it did cause me to think quite a bit about it. I had another one of those “weird intersections in people’s lives” moment. But of course it didn’t last long, because we landed in Ontario before too long. About the time that they said that we could turn on our cell phones when we had reached the gate, I realized that I had left mine on the whole trip. Oops. I’m glad I didn’t make the airplane crash or something.
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Chinese water and other kinds of (self) torture
Okay, this one’s gonna be long, but it’s worth it… past all the techweenie stuff is some very amusing personal tragedy.
So let’s back up to last night about 7pm. I get home first for a change, and I sit down at my computers to get the network up and running. See, I have this ideal in my head where every computer in the house (yes, there are at least 7) can connect to the internet, and print to the printers, and in an ideal world, see each other via Microsoft Networking, although I think I’m going to settle for just having a common file server to dump stuff on.
The central focus for all my efforts lies in the hands of a single machine, oh so lovingly named “habitrail,” my Linux machine, which has been serving as my gateway/webserver/MP3 storage site for the last two years.
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Stupid warning labels.
So Luke and I were at Fry’s yesterday (in the prelude to last night’s computer madness) and one of the things I was looking at was a new set of computer speakers, for use on my old tv in the office, so we can at least get stereo. Anyway, one of the sets of speakers came in a blister pack about 12 inches tall, with both speakers clearly visible. On the packaging was text and pictures showing the speakers in use with a stereo “Use with your stereo!” and with a computer “Use with your PC!” and underneath that was the following text:
“PC not included.”
Ugh and other randomness
You can tell what kind of day it’s going to be by how many of the new emails you get in the morning get marked “to do”.
Today was 6, which is on the high side for me.
I got my Game Boy Advance in the mail… and probably won’t be able to play it for a few days.
I was up until 2:30am last night moving my Linux machine to the new place, now that we have working DSL (yay). Silly me, I tried to upgrade it at the same time, which created all sorts of lovely problems and I ended up going back to the old motherboard. So yes, it’s still a Pentium MMX 166. At least now it has more memory and more disk space… but damn, it’s slow.
I think the constant exposure to high levels of dust is giving me allergies or something… go figure. I need to finish moving.
Speedy DSL goodness
I think I just had what had to be the most painless DSL install ever. The guy comes in, checks the line, line’s good, plugs in DSL modem, hooks up laptop, sets up laptop to our one of our IP addresses, it works.
Guy says thank you, here’s a free ethernet card that came with DSL modem, and the quite large manual for said modem, bag of filters for phone lines so phones don’t interfere with DSL… bye!
Go over to our computers, change the IP and they work. Luke got 142KB/s download of Mozilla. Very very nice.
Then half an hour later, the cable guy comes into the apartment… tracks mud all over the place (grrrrrr) but eventually gets two digital cable boxes hooked up. Thankfully, digital cable also involves analog cable as well so Luke can use his picture-in-picture.
Tonight, I’m gonna move my Linux machine, so my webpage will be down for a bit, for the ten of you who actually care in the world. (Then the DNS has to update, so it may be a little bit after that…)
More pain.
And now I just had a collision going to the bathroom… I was going in as someone was coming out, and as a result, I slammed into the door and smacked my left elbow… which now hurts like all hell…
Pain
So I’ve been moving for the last two weeks, and in the course of that time, I have done considerable damage to my arms (my right one in particular). To note:
– Sunburn on both arms, the right one bad enough to peel.
– Bruise on my right arm, from carrying so many frigging boxes.
– Pain on my right palm, from using a manual screwdrier to assemble IKEA furniture.
– Nick on my left index finger from where the screwdriver slipped when assmebling said furniture.
– Pain in my right right wrist after I landed on it wrong when I slipped and fell down the stairs.
– Nick on my left index finger from reaching into a random box and scraping it against something sharp.
– Overall soreness in my shoulders from carrying stuff all the time.
In short, I’m in pain.
Basic Math
So I was at Taco Bell today. The total for my meal came to $4.85. I gave the woman a 5 dollar bill. She gave me $1.15 in change, even though the do-the-math-for-you cash register said “$.15 change” on it. Being the honest person I am, I told her that was $1 too much. She gave me an odd look, as if she didn’t understand. I said “5 minus 4.85 is .15”, she still didn’t get it. I tried a few more times, and gave up and just pushed the dollar back at her on the counter. She got confused and asked “oh, did you want it in quarters?” I backed away slowly, saying “you gave me too much, leave it in the drawer…”
This, of course, was on top of the fact that I had to tell her I wanted it “for here” twice.