the eXternal mind

“Two weeks” will the be time until I get my computer back, according the Toshiba service representative. Noooooo! My Tablet PC is like essential to my education. It’s great to be able to take clean notes and write up problem sets without the constraint of paper. Also, I set up my computer in a good way to maximize my productivity (minus the procrastinations caused by the computer).

*Sigh*

Toshiba will most likely end up reformatting my hard drive, so I spent a lot of today running around trying to get someone to help me back up the data. The problem was that my laptop’s hard drive has an SATA (15-pin) connector which isn’t that common yet. The cool thing was that I sent an email out to my house and a lot of people responded offering to help. However, not everyone had the solution I needed. I’m going to try to work with a few people tomorrow to get my data backed up (Luckily, I made backups last month. However, I’d still like to have my recent data).

But what in the meanwhile? Fortunately, Eric T. (previously mentioned on this blog) had haphazardly put together a computer that was sitting in the corner of the computer lab unused since it still had to be polished up with software and some hardware tweaks. So I managed to “borrow” the computer for a while to tweak it up while at the same time using it for my own purposes. Once I get my laptop shipped back, this desktop machine will be be gloriously returned to the computer lab with perfectly configured software :).

So anyway, just when I was about to get back on schedule after a tough midterms week (or two), this laptop problem suddenly pushed me behind schedule again. That means I must get to work now…

I suppose I have to post something. Sorry to my lack of writing these days. I’m still alive though, but as busy as hell. This week I have about 8 big assignments to complete in the span of 4-5 days. I had to give my SURF presentation today, and I was losing a lot of sleep these past days trying to put the presentation together. Clocking about 60 slides, I think I managed to pull the presentation off well despite finishing the slides only about an hour before the real deal.

Since I kind of promised someone that I wouldn’t procrastinate as much this year, I’ve been trying to keep on schedule as much as possible which meant a complete neglect of this blog. Needless to say, I’m still thinking so I’m still existing.

Well, what can I say? I’m back in this weird school. I arrived here yesterday after a combined total of 11 hours of travelling. Since I got the biggest double in Avery (the house I’m living in), I was trying to move around furniture so that my bed doesn’t sit on top of my desk (it’s one of those college furniture things). But alas, after moving furniture around for like 3 hours trying 3 configurations, I finally gave up and went back to something very similar to the original configuration of the room. I was kind of mad at myself for creating an ironic situation.

My roommate isn’t back yet so I get free reign of the room. One cool thing was that since my room is so big, the Avery house LCD projector was dumped into my room. I have this nice big white wall in my room… Can anyone say: “Big screen DVDs?!” If I had a couch in my room, it’d be like movie night in my room every week.

I went to Target to buy lots of stuff today. It was actually farther than I remembered. Some of my textbooks are in limbo since Caltech forwarded them to my house after I had them shipped to Caltech. Finally, I still have to put together a rough draft of my final SURF research paper before Saturday.

I’m going to try to adhere to my promise of putting academic work in high priority (over procrastination which used to override everything). Therefore, I will go work on the paper.