Day One. Still tired from the move...

As I am supposed to be studying for the two exams I have today and tomorrow, I am, of course, not doing what I'm supposed to be doing. I've been playing on facebook for at least 45 minutes. And it occurred to me that I know a bunch of folks who keep blogs. I read through a couple of them tonight and decided that it looks like a nice outlet.

After all, I'm living alone again and am freshly singled. Talking to my cat makes me feel like a crazy person, so I am instead opting to talk to no one in particular. At least now I can say what I want without fear of getting clawed later.

I guess I'll use this for life updates, deep thoughts, venting (if absolutely necessary) and as something to keep my thinking clear on matters. After all, I surely don't want to send something out into the void of the internet unless I'm positive that's how I feel.

For example, I've calculated that once my current downloads finish, my movie harddrive will be well over 85% full of JUST movies, numberring them close to a thousand. I'm amazed that in the few short weeks that I got on this kick, I've amassed over 700 movies already. I backed them up to my portable external HD and took them to a movie night for a friend's birthday party. Twas good fun. In a few weeks, when more of them finish, I'll make the main backup to the 5tb drive.

The exam I should be studying for is Phonetics, especially considering I was half-assing it yesterday and today I spent the 5 hours of GOOD studying I had on Historical Linguistics (Tuesday's Exam). I need to concentrate, but I can't get myself to focus. My first impuls is to drink another Mt Dew and get a snack to break up the time, but if I do too much in too short a time, I'll get hyper and concentrating will be impossible. Then I'll inevitably crash at 5am.

So I'm doing this instead.

In one of my bouts of NOT concentrating last night, I ordered a new black leather collar for Sabrina. I also ordered some 1/2 inch spikes to affix to it. :) It'll make for a nice little project after things calm down academically... ...and at work.

Work went from idle to overdrive in a single heartbeat. I've been cross-trained to check the undergrad's lab work (bleeping out personal info in interview recordings); not just do the computer work. Now that I've been cross-trained, I'm under pressure to alleviate the work of my officemates. However, there is now a sudden and urgent April deadline to perfect software for release in time for a conference I am not going to be attending. That means there is a very long laundry list of worker programs and file checker programs and such that I need to finish implementing SOON so that our Finland collaborators have clean data to work with. And on top of that, I'm trying to get a Quantum tape drive working on the only machine that has a PCI Exp x8 slot: a linux machine running a flavor of linux that I despise.

So I have less than six weeks to accomplish magic, and all the while, I'm being pressured to do two other peoples' jobs. I was offended when the suggestion came up that the undergrad checking load be divided up into thirds to be distributed between us. (A) They get paid more than I do, while I am the one with the unique skill set. (B) I can't divide up my hardware work, network tasks, and C# Java C++ etc programming into three parts. And (C) I'm the only person who stays in the lab past 4pm, e.g., my work isn't done just because it's mid-afternoon.

In other news, yes, I was robbed over Xmas break. The cops have arrested a suspected drug dealer, and while raiding his house, found one of my guns (definitely mine, serial numbers match) and a back room set up for gaming that was full of what may be a very large portion of the stuff that was stolen from my apartment. The detective said they'll be doing a full inventory of what they find in his place and will be comparing it to the detailed list of stolen property I gave them. Then they'll ensure that what's mine is mine, and that it gets returned to me. SWEET.

Well, I've killed enough time. A solid 20 minutes! I'm going to go back over Ch 4 in "A Course In Phonetics." I know you're jealous.