Really, I’m not. The last month has just been very busy. I will try to give a brief roundup. My birthday and associated presents was great. I got lots of cool music and books (and some yummy candy). In addition to the ones I mentioned in a previous post, I got a new copy of 1984, Invisible Frontiers, Altered Carbon, Ambient, What Einstein told his Cook, and Stop Making Sense. I am probably half way through reading things at this point. I also bought myself Thievery Corporation’s The Richest Man in Babylon. which is the group that played on the final night at the ACLU membership conference. Good stuff.
On the work front, the students are back. A coworker and I were in charge of running this years Fall Startup project. This involves organizing the process by which we get all of the freshman connected to the network. William and Mary has never done this twice the same, but I think we ran a system this year that will be the model for future years. We had wonderful cooperation from all of the OAs and things went quite smoothly. IT set up appointments with each team of OAs over the weekend following the friday of freshman move-in. At the appointed time, the OA would make sure all of their students were in their hall, and a team of IT folks would show up (in their stylish black t-shirts designed by moi) and make sure everyone was set up. The best part was we gave the OAs information on how to get their students connected prior to when we showed up and many of the halls had greater than 90% of their students hooked up before we even showed up. And to give them a small incentive, the more students they had hooked up, the greater their chances were to win 1 of 2 Apple iPods. Everyone was happy (and tired).
And with the arrival of the students is the start of classes. I am taking another graduate CS class, Network Systems and Design. It has been interesting, if not exactly educational yet. The professor is 3 years older than I am, which adds an odd dynamic to his perspective. I was looking forward to having the class be a combined undergraduate/graduate course, but with the exception of one undergrad I know, I no longer have that opinion. The undergraduates are generally annoying and I would much have preferred just having myself and the other 8 grad students than have 8 graduate students plus 40 undergrads.
The shelves! They are getting closer to completion. We are putting the finish coats of paint on now. It is a nice gloss white. All of the woodworking has been completed. But the painting is a slow process.
That is all I can think of for now.