Birthdays, Ben & Jerry's, and Doing Battle with the Devil with Math as My Only Weapon
Today (and I mean "today" as in June 1st, since as far as I'm concerned it's still Friday) is Felix's birthday. I'm guessing you probably won't read this today, but in case you do: Happy Birthday (again)!! I admit that I'm more than a little sad that I can't be there, and it sucks that neither of us can be together at all for either of our birthdays this year (summer birthdays = teh suck), but what can you do? Life goes on. Unfortunately.
Time To Spoil Myself A Little
So rather than waiting until toward the end of the post to include the Picture of the Day, I figured I'd start off with it this time. I'll even hold off on explaining the context until after I show the photo! How very revolutionary of me, ne?
One way to combat loneliness is to spoil myself a bit every once in a while. I don't mean to spend huge amounts of money on myself, since I do want to try my hardest to make my $4,000 target by the end of the summer, but even treating myself in little ways can go a long way. So, one thing I promised myself that I'd do this summer is go out for ice cream every payday. Well, today was payday, so, sure enough, as soon as I got off work and had dinner, I walked to the Ben & Jerry's in Squirrel Hill.
The weird thing was, while I was deciding which flavor to go with this time, the girl at the counter commented that I looked way too sad. She kept saying, "It's Friday! Be happy!" Now, I wasn't particularly unhappy, or not any more than I usually am. I felt pretty okay. I was just tired, because the weather was not too hot but very humid and sticky, and I'd just walked a good mile or so, uphill most of the way. I told the girl that, but she seemed convinced that I was depressed, so she said, "I'll tell you what... I'll give you a discount!" I thought she was joking, and laughed, then ordered myself a single scoop of caramel ice cream in a waffle cone, with rainbow sprinkles (because I felt like reconnecting with my childhood, I guess). To my surprise, she said, "Okay. I'll just charge you for the single scoop, and not for the waffle cone or the sprinkles," and sure enough, that was all she rang me up for. I was kind of confused by it all, but not ungrateful, of course.
The ice cream was delicious, though a little too sweet for my tastes. Admittedly, I do have a fairly low tolerance for sugary things. Still, Americans can learn something from the Europeans when it comes to making ice cream. I think I'll try the creme brulée ice cream next time. :D
Classes, Classes, Classes... (And Not The Java Kind)
Classwork has been fairly intense this week, which is part of the reason why I didn't write again sooner. The homework workload is still okay, and not quite as bad as I'd feared it might be, but it's still enough that (coupled with work) it's worn me out quite a bit. Unfortunately I can't take too much time out for relaxing and recreation this weekend, since I have a Matrix exam on Monday and a C program due that same night. The end of next week is already the equivalent of mid-"semester", so the week after that I have exams in C and Concepts. I expect things will keep up at a fairly rapid pace, and there'll probably be no slowing down again until the end of the first session.
I'm kind of glad, though. I'm not really enjoying my classes as much as I might. It's interesting, taking all math and programming classes after taking a full year of design and humanities and social sciences classes, and it's not like I dislike either of them on principle (or I wouldn't be minoring in CS). But both my math classes are the kind of classes where the material is just not that much fun if you don't have a teacher who's outwardly enthusiastic and inspiring like, say, Mrs. Schweiger and Mrs. Fairbanks. I can't say that about either Grossberg or Luo. Sure, they know their stuff, but they aren't really capable of making this stuff very exciting. It all stays pretty bland. I know that I should enjoy Matrix because it has so many real-world applications, especially since I'm going to be specializing in computer graphics, but the stuff we've been doing still seems pretty irrelevant. Either that or Luo just hasn't been very good at explaining the overall significance of what we're learning. As for Concepts, the material still has been so much review of things I've already done before that I don't feel very intellectually stimulated. And Grossberg is just such a dull teacher. I think the most exciting thing he's ever said was the other day, when he told us that we should take doing proofs as seriously as if we were superheroes doing battle with the Devil, with math as our only weapon.
C is the opposite; Hoffman is a cool teacher. He's fun to listen to and he still knows his stuff, so he makes it worth getting up and coming to class every morning. The problem is, I'm still a little too intimidated by the material to really enjoy that class; I constantly vacillate between mild worry and outright terror. Hopefully once I get a little further in the class and make A's on my labs and get more comfortable with the language, I'll gain a little more confidence and feel better about it in general. But until then, I'm just too constantly scared to enjoy it much.
Work Squared. Because I Have Two Jobs Now.
It's actually only work doubled, of course. But "Work Squared" sounds so much catchier. But anyway...
I've spent a LOT of time at work this week. I've already made up almost all of Monday's hours, so I don't really need to worry about working too much this weekend. I think I've also figured out how I want to set up my work schedule from now on. If I work for Jeanne from 8 to 9 AM (before my first class) and during my lunch break from 12 to 1:30 PM (a working lunch), that already gives me 2.5 hours a day for her. Then I work for Curt from 3 to 7 PM. That gives me 6.5 hours a day. The remaining 5 hours I need to get to 37.5 I can work on the weekends, for Jeanne. I'll probably split it up between two 2.5-hour (or one 2-hour and one 3-hour) shifts on Saturdays and Sundays, so as not to overload myself and give myself a good reason to get out of bed on time.
As for the work itself, this week has been fairly okay. I was a little worried about how everything would go in Curt's absence, since I admit I'm not overly fond of working with Christina. Nothing against her personally, we just don't work together particularly well. Anyway, the good news was that she ended up handling most of the facilities stuff, which left me to worry about computing. In other words, I mainly just got to sit there and run updates and virus scans on computers and that kind of stuff. That's what they pay me almost $10/hr to do. It's pretty awesome.
My greatest accomplishment of the week was one computer in particular that I was doing maintenance on. Curt alerted me last week that this machine was running unnecessarily slowly, and that he suspected something was wrong with it. I ran the usual updates, upgraded to the latest version of Symantec, etc., then try to scan the computer with Symantec, Ad-Aware and Spybot, but the scans kept failing. What really freaked me out was when I tried to install EasyCleaner, and the computer wouldn't let me (for no given reason). So I messed with it for days, manually deleted tons of unnecessary files to speed up the scans, then tried Symantec again, and sure enough, the scan completed successfully, and found four trojans and two instances of malicious adware in the process. Obviously we got rid of those, and Spybot and Ad-Aware didn't find anything else significant. Yet the computer was still running a bit more slowly than it should. So, I messed with it some more... ran EasyCleaner, deleted more unnecessary shit, and then set it to defragment. It took almost a whole day to defrag, but once it completed successfully, the computer was suddenly so fast, I could not believe my eyes. It seriously was running faster than almost any 2.6 GHz, 512 MB RAM PC I'd ever seen. I was quite proud of that, since Curt had been talking about completely reformatting this machine, so I'm glad that it seems like we won't have to resort to that.
In terms of things I failed to accomplish... We had a really weird occurrence yesterday, where every HP Deskjet 6940 in the department suddenly stopped responding to the network. All the printers in CEE are networked and connected to the giant CEE server, and technically, all the printers were still connected. But the documents sent to any of the 6940 HP's that we own (and we have quite a few) were not showing up in any of the appropriate queues and therefore weren't printing. It was the oddest thing, especially since these printers literally just suddenly stopped working from one minute to the next, for no explainable reason. And it was only the printers of this same model, and all of them at the exact same time. I think Curt had mentioned that something similar had happened before, but since he's still on vacation, he couldn't tell us how to fix it. And Chrissy had left early, so I was the only one around when it happened. It was not a super-serious problem since we still have many, many other printers that were all still working just fine, but I still got to deal with quite a few disgruntled people because the 6940s are some of the only color printers that we have.
...And that's really about as exciting as my Facilities job gets. As for my work for Jeanne, it has been strangely enjoyable so far. You'd think that database entry work would bore a person like me to death, but there's something inherently satisfying about creating order out of chaos. It's also nice to have some time every day when I can do work that doesn't involve dealing with other people. Not that I dislike people, by any means. But my Facilities job involves dealing with people a lot, and can sometimes get a bit frustrating because of it. I wouldn't say that overall I like Jeanne's job better, since in the end it probably will get sickeningly monotonous, but until then, it's not bad.
I'll talk more about that work at some other time, though. It's getting late, and I'm tired. I should call Felix and head to bed.
My plans for the weekend? Tomorrow (Saturday), I still haven't decided between sewing or playing video games. I really am worn out, so video games would be more relaxing, but sewing would make me feel like I'd been making more productive use of my weekend, so I'm not sure. I know you're probably thinking, "Why not do both?" but I'm the type of person where, as soon as I get immersed in something, I'll completely forget the time. So chances are, I'll start one thing and not be able to stop myself until 2 or 3 AM.
Sunday, I'm doing more of Jeanne's work, Matrix homework, preparing hardcore for the exam, and working on my C program. Hopefully that's all doable within a day. I really don't want to be up until 5 again this time. But I do need to take a break tomorrow, or I might go insane.