Schoolwork first, of course. Well, today I wrote the reflection on the Immaculate Conception that's due tomorrow. See, I'm studying. Actually, I suspect I got a little carried away - 5 pages - but I figure that's because I used doublespace and a large font so that Fr. Roche will be able to read it carefully.

You know, I can't actually read the screen while sitting down in bed and holding my laptop at comfortable typing distance. Good thing there's speech synthesis and a nice set of earphones. Earphone, actually, although I'm discovering the disadvantages of having a really small hedset - the earbud sometimes slips out of my ear. It's quite strange, really.

In other news, I spent a fair bit of time improving planner.el. So this is what being a maintainer is like - always tweaking, always improving... =) I'm fortunate to have such a good (and persistent - let's not forget that) beta tester by the name of Eric Belpaire - he's been trying out the newest versions of planner.el and helping me improve it.

In fact, I spent more time tweaking Emacs than I did working on my thesis, which is not good because I have a deadline coming up Real Soon Now - on the 13th, to be exact. That is amazingly, terrifyingly close. Well, I'm not sure if I even have a shot at the LinuxChallenge, but who cares - I might as well try. I've got a draft of my paper up at ../school/current/cs197/linux-challenge.tex - all I have to do now is actually get the results, which means some heavy-duty cramming tomorrow.

I should plan my day better. Looking at the tasks accomplished... Haven't done much.

Also, should tell mom that my phone refuses to charge. It flickers on using the battery I have, but dies quickly.

Someone I know referenced me in his blog. Marcelle - remember him? Right. I never could quite figure out why he was going nuts over the fact that I'm simply not the kind of person who can arbitrarily become best friends with people, and certainly our lack of intersect would make it rather difficult for us to get to know each other. Anyway, he seems to have dealt with that issue fairly well. His blog is over at http://www.mistervader.blogspot.com , and is - as he admitted in e-mail - fairly angsty, although I find it really just more concerned about things like Otaku Boards (http://www.otakuboards.com), which I'd visited but haven't really felt at home in. I am surprisingly less anime-centric than the stereotypical geek, I suppose.

Must find a way to clean mouse point.

Ah, yes, the wireless card. =) I am a very lucky girl. My parents got me a wireless card for my Christmas gift (in addition to my beautiful subnotebook, of course). One of the things I really like about my parents is that they won't actually wait until Christmas to give it to me, since I can very well use it before then. =) I have clueful parents.

Got my wireless card working. There was a bit of confusion about eth0 and eth1 - turned out to be my fault. Once I had gotten my dhclient all sorted out (I was mistakenly calling it from intuitively, and that turned out to be a Bad Thing), it Just Worked. For reference, I've got a Linksys WPC-11 Instant Wireless card. It's supposed to be a Prism2, so has limited functionality but can act as a wireless access point with the hostap tools. Coverage in Faura is not bad, but I haven't checked other areas for decent signal. Should improve if Dr. Sarmenta manages to get Microsoft to agree to blanket the campus with wireless access points.

Speaking of Dr. Sarmenta... He was in a meeting earlier, so we didn't have ThesisProject class. I want to change advisors. ;)

Back to Microsoft. I really, really hope they push through with the wireless thing. I don't understand why Microsoft isn't very actively courting us. C'mon, if I were an evil empire and I wanted to ensure my hold on the future generations, I'd get them while they were young. I'd give freebies, training, cool gadgets, lots of publicity... Microsoft's a large company with plenty of budget to spare. We just won an international competition - you think they'd take advantage of that wonderful PR opportunity. I suppose their marketing is losing their edge. ;) Of course this is all just personal opinion, since our school obviously believes in Microsoft enough to go for the Academic Alliance and that .NET stuff, but still...

If you think about it, many of our classes are too vendor-centric. Take Contemporary Databases (translation: Oracle), or Enterprise Java Programming (guess), or even Intro to C++, which was actually pretty okay if not fairly boring, and had a sliver of MFC tacked on at the end but didn't cover other toolkits). On the plus side, we do actually have Systems Programming, which is Unix-based thanks to the strong push of people like William Yu, Sir Marco and Doc Mana if I'm not mistaken. w00t!

(Update 2003.09.24: Come to think of it, we're remarkably not vendor-centric - at least the classe I've taken.)

Anyway, I really should be going to bed now. My roommate has borrowed my alarm clock again - it's apparently the loudest in the dorm... =) Hopefully I'll remember to wake up tomorrow. Good night!

I shall try to get into the habit of keeping journals like this. They are fairly handy. And quite long, given my penchant for verbosity and sometimes even grandiloquence, employing polysyllabic constructs when uncomplicated utteran.. Oh, you know what I mean. ;) Actually, I've noticed that I get much more formal when I'm stressed - doesn't everyone? - and some people say a bit of a British accent creeps into my voice. Where they got that idea is beyond me, as I grew up watching Sesame Street and I listen to a monotonous computer-generated voice. Then again, Kathy's picked up this weird accent from somewhere, so it must be just one of those things.

I _really_ have to drag myself off to bed now.

Class tomorrow, that's right.

If I don't get off now I'm going to schedule an involuntary shutdown.

Right, then.

Prying fingers off keyboard.

(Oh, I had pizza this evening, thanks to Gino and Brian. Bryan? Argh.)

'night, world!