Special Delivery

I went on a little bit of a spending binge, buying books and computer parts. The computer parts are going towards a media PC I'm going to build for my parents. It'll be loaded with the three terabytes-and-change of digital media I have: music, movies, TV series, cartoons, anime... The list goes on.

I also got myself a little item to aid in safe backups. It's a docking station for SATA drives. It's not an external enclosure. No no. You take a regular internal drive and drop it in the slot and turn it on. Now I can just keep a stack of 1TB drives that all my data is back up on. And in other news, my replacement safe just came in this week, so I can keep the stack of drives in their in case of fire or theft.

I only wish the Detective who told me he found my stuff would call back. I've been trying to reach him for a week now. Homeboy doesn't return voicemail messages. I'd like to know what of mine he recovered from the drug dealer's house.

I also got a student-discount version of Visual Studio 2008. I'm not sure if I want to put it on my big desktop or if I want to put it on my little laptop. After all, my little laptop is the PC I take back and forth to work with me. BUT, I'd rather have VS2008 on my big computer here at home. Maybe I can get Dr. K to get a copy for one of the work PCs.

There's also a butt-load of books on the way from Amazon:
- Connectionism and the Philosophy of Mind
- Robot Programming : A Practical Guide to Behavior-Based Robotics
- Connectionist Natural Language Processing
- Neural-Symbolic Learning Systems
- Optimality Theory: Constraint Interaction in Generative Grammar
- Connectionism and the Philosophy of Psychology

Clearly, these won't be read until Summer. Quite frankly, I wish I had a whole semester off to read. Just read! I think I'd learn a lot more than I do sitting through classes, plucking out the parts I find useful as I go along.

I mean, seriously. I feel like the happiest time I spent learning was my last semester at the University of Florida when ALL I was doing was working for housing and working on my senior design project. It took several months, but I taught myself Prolog and created a program that solves rubiks cubes. Maybe it'll be like that again this summer when I'm working on my AI thesis and studying for my oral exams. Maybe that'll be what PhD research is like someday. We'll see.

At some point I need to fix my sister's computer. I've got two old 500gb drives to throw in there and load up with media for her. But I ought to just throw the thing in the garbage after the caniption she threw when I got robbed. Seriously. My apartment was broken into, my cat could have been hurt, and thousands of dollars of my junk was stolen... ...and she threw a FIT because I needed to use the phone and the computer to reschedule my flight and coordinate things with the police, my landlord, my catsitters, etc. etc. But nooooo. She needed the computer to chat with her friends online. I was floored. Her selfishness was astounding.

But I built her this computer, and despite her egocentrism, she's still my sister. It needs fixing because she let some stupid boy screw with it. Now it's infected with viruses and spyware. So it needs fixin. And it's up to me.

In other news, I know it's Friday night and Spring break, but I was intending to go into the office to get some work done today. BUT AGAIN, thanks to my vampire sleep schedule, I feel asleep at 9am and woke up at 5pm. So I'm going to go into the lab tonight, pack a lunch, and stay there until all my work is done. That ought to be enough to keep me awake through tomorrow night. Then I'll go to sleep Saturday night and get my sleep schedule back on track.

So I'm going to shower up and get the hell out of dodge. I'll pack a few sandwhiches and pick up dinner on the way over there. I'm sure I've got enough Mt Dew to make it through the next 24 hours. At least I hope so.