Tim's blog

So when they say winter quarter at Rose is hectic? They're not kidding. I just found my first solid chunk of downtime since I came back to school two weeks ago. What have I been up to, you ask?

For starters, the Festivus, Christmas, and New Year's celebrations that occurred over my last break were all most excellent. This year was the fifth consecutive Festivus celebrated within the group, and it was by far the smoothest a Festivus has ever gone. The Airing of Grievances was trouble-free, the introduction of a white elephant gift exchange went smoothly, and our Feats of Strength involved that classic game Set. For Christmas a few days later, hordes of relatives (from both sides of the family) descended on the house for almost an entire week all told. (Most hilarious was our cousin Keith, who's two and just being ridiculous all over the place. He got an iPod Touch for Christmas. He's two.) Lastly, New Year's went well overall, despite some illnesses on part of a couple of the partygoers. Mario Kart is never so hilarious as when played sleep-deprived at 4am. Continue reading "A couple updates"

So the other day I bought a guitar.

A lot of people have been telling me that this seems really random - since when did I want to learn to play guitar? It's understandable, given that I didn't really talk to that many people about it ahead of time, but I've been looking to take up another musical instrument for awhile now. I wanted something more portable than the piano, which I played for a couple years way back when, but still relatively common and popular (so not the ocarina in my closet).

The MSU trip I took awhile ago was really what put "guitar" in my head. The instant I got there, we all sat down in the middle of a basketball court and like four different people all pulled out guitars, and everyone was having a great time. I thought, why not take it up myself? Continue reading "Not an impulse buy, I promise"

Walking back to the dorm from a Learning Center shift the other day, I was chatting with one of the office staff who lived nearby about our respective majors. He was a double (CS/SE); I was a triple (CS/SE/MA). The difference between us, I discovered, was that he filed a plan of study and I had not.

Actually, the difference was that he knew that a plan of study had to be filed in order to have more than one major, and I did not. He also knew that this plan had to be filed by the end of your junior year. I was aware of none of this, and subsequently had a slight panic moment. Continue reading "I've been told I'm insane."

Our floor is a pretty boisterous one, and the guys who live here are prone to getting into certain predicaments that most dorms might not encounter. So when I hear someone running down the hall screaming "We have to go to the hospital!", I figured it was only a matter of time, really. But that shouldn't stop me from going to see what the fuss is about. Continue reading "In stitches"

It all started three weeks ago.

A bunch of friends from Rose and I were all just hanging out in the Apartments, when for no particular reason I decided to suggest that one guy here (also named Tim) and Chris become friends on Facebook. I had my laptop with me, so I did, and the friendship established itself shortly thereafter. This was apparently all the prompting Chris needed to drive the five hours down from MSU to come visit Rose, putting into motion a massive chain of events that ended in nothing less than pure awesome. Continue reading "Like exchange students, but awesomer"

Funniest 8am EVER.

I show up, and the first thing I see is the giant vat of coffee sitting on the end of one of the tables. This is not new; our prof is nice enough to buy us all coffee on various days, especially on Fridays. I'm actually like ten minutes early at this point, so I grab some coffee and sit down.

That's when I notice the other thing: nobody from my group is in class with me. I was only expecting one out of three in the first place: one of my group members had an appendectomy the other day, and another is at his sister's wedding, but there was supposed to be at least one other person there.

So I'm sitting there sipping my coffee when the prof finally decides to start class (five minutes late - we had about 50% attendance when the bell rang, so he held off a bit until a few more latecomers straggled in). He begins with announcements, and the following conversation took place:

Prof: "OK, so one of the feedbacks I got from you guys was to keep announcing when the homework was due. The next homework is due Sunday-"
Student (in the back): "Wait. Why is it due Sunday?"
Prof: "Do you ever pay attention?" Continue reading "This just happened"

I celebrated a triumphant return to college a couple weeks ago, moving in the 30th and finding it very easy to get back into the swing of things. First thing I did? Help run a laptop orientation session for the freshman.

The way it works is as follows: every freshman is required to buy the same laptop. This makes support a lot easier for our tech department, and also means that the school can standardize on a set of software that everyone gets access to (and gets pretty deep discounts on at the same time, because of the volume of purchases made). However, the network services here are pretty intense - we run everything from an online learning management system (ANGEL, for those wondering, but it may shift to Blackboard in the not-so-distant future) to a couple different network file systems (AFS and DFS) to integrated Kerberos/LDAP authentication.

Technobabble over.

Anyway, the complete orientation takes about four hours, and includes just about everything a new student could possibly want to do with their laptop. I do mean everything - the session starts with a ten-slide PowerPoint presentation before it even gets to "plug in your laptop," and progresses through another ten slides before it gets to "press the power button to turn on your laptop." I did get to deal with some pretty interesting questions - one kid didn't receive exactly half his power cord, and another got two mice in his package. And I got paid for four hours' work. Not a bad deal. Continue reading "Back to school"

Snow Leopard, the sixth iteration of Mac OS X, came out today. Being the good little Apple fanboys that we are, Chris and I decided to go get copies as soon as we could, which meant when the Apple Store opened at 9am this morning.

So we drove down to the store, getting there around 9:10 (Chris overslept slightly), and walking in to a very sparsely populated store with no visible employees, except for one sketchy guy who darted into the back as soon as we came in. The doors were unlocked, though, and there were several people inside who were just playing with laptops or waiting at the Genius Bar, and it was one of these people who eventually told us: the store doesn't open until 10.

I was mildly upset. Continue reading "Big Cats, Part VI"

So wow. Summer's gone. I head back to school the morning of the 30th, then dive right in with freshman laptop orientation the 31st and a Learning Center tutor "retreat" (two-hour meeting) on the 2nd. Classes begin the 3rd.

In light of all that, I thought I'd take a moment and recap what my summer was like this year. Continue reading "Summer summary (summery?)"

Long-distance relationships are hard. So when Jessica and family offered to have me visit for a few days, I was only too happy to oblige.

I stayed in Germantown, TN for a total of four days and three nights. I took the Amtrak both ways, and got back home with just enough time to do laundry, repack, and head off to Pennsylvania for the family reunion. (More on that later).

I left home at around 4pm on Saturday, July 25, taking the Metra from Barrington into the city for a 9pm departure from Union Station. Apparently, due to the boat parade, it was the fourth-busiest day of the year for the Metra into the city, and everyone was drinking on the way. Through random happenstance, I wound up sitting next to a few soon-to-be-partiers that knew Aiello from the high school. They seemed reasonably surprised that he turned out to be a teacher - "the last thing," one of them declared, "that I thought he'd wind up being."

Once in the city, I stopped at Garrett Popcorn to pick up a two-gallon tub of delicious popcorn for Jessica's family, by way of a thank-you gift. Regrettably, the store in Ogilvie was closed on the weekends, so I wound up hauling a backpack and duffel bag eight blocks by foot across the city to get the popcorn, then carrying it all back ten blocks to the station. I was reasonably tired by the time I got there.

The train left Union Station pretty much on time, and but for a distinctly mean and unhelpful conductor, the ride was pretty standard. I wasn't able to buy business class like I was on the way up to MSU - this train, the City of New Orleans, had no business-class cars - but it was mostly empty, so I was able to stretch out across two seats. There was also an electrical outlet right next to me, so I could charge my phone and laptop and get a meager amount of work done on the train. I slept about half the 10.5-hour trip, and arrived about a half hour late in Memphis to Jessica and her father, who were awaiting me at the station. Continue reading "Hello Germantown"