ThePanda

This probably is my last post from Delhi, before I get back to Providence and 82 degree weather (is hot, is what Dashboard says I should expect on Saturday, though this is New England I am talking about), not that I leave tomorrow, but I leave soon, and let’s face it there really isn’t much to write about in an existence dictated by food, packing up, going out to eat, and other such things. Oh well… Today’s probably not the best of days for the world in general, it being the 10th anniversary of the launch of Windows 95, of the ‘you make a grown man cry’ fame, not that I am complaining because a little less than 10 years ago (a month, a week, not sure), me, my father, an old acquaintance who seems to have since disappeared, sat in front of a 486DX2 (state of the art back in those days), with no less than 32 disks, attempting to install said operating system, failing at least once (my memory fails me about how many times exactly we failed, or where exactly, though I remember something to the effect of the 24^th disk being corrupted), before finally installing it, and being introduced to an operating system which almost instantly booted into a GUI. The love affair was short lived, it crashed too often, ate into my computer’s resources, was slow, was not nearly as cool as the Apple IIsi my father possessed in his office, and which I had been introduced to a few years earlier. OK Apple love came later, I was OK with Windows 95, NT 4.0, 98, RHL 6, RHL 7, RHL 8 (in that order), for some time before I finally went on to a Macintosh. And for those who notice this discrepancy in the list, no I really haven’t ever owned a machine which ran either Win2K, WinXP, any of the Fedora Core releases, or any other flavor of Linux, though Babbage, Fermi and Marconi, the computers I used in the i-lab at the CS department did run a Debian version compiled specifically to take advantage of the 64-bit capabilities offered by the Athlon 64. Oh well Macs are cooler, but I did once own a computer running Windows 95, I did once believe digital watches were über cool, and I did once love most things about Windows 95, so yup it’s 10 years since it came out, and well it’s no longer supported by Microsoft, go figure.

Things change unexpectedly, and I am finally also doing something semi-accademic for a job, and something which promises to be über fun. Most things require background information, and a lot of changes can be blamed on the Facebook. The jury’s still out on its new design, though I am not entirely sure I like it much, the clunky (they called it so) blue boxes were kind of nice, and umm did a better job of keeping things separated, but oh well, things change. Which brings me back to my second change… About two months ago, I had walked into this office where most of the Math departments admin staff seems to sit, wishing to sign up as a grader for math courses (I guess my thoughts were somewhat along the lines of could be fun), and umm not running into requisite person, and having to leave for Park City soon, I left a message with someone else, which I thought would work. Except no one got back to me, many days passed, and I decided that once I was back in Providence, I will go back and check up on the entire thing. Like last year they were hiring graders well into orientation week, and there can’t be too many graders anyways, and well I guess if it didn’t work out, I could always blame luck or something. Well turns out they did receive my stuff, and the powers that be got back to me yesterday, and I am now helping grade/am officially called a grader for TFB’s linear algebra class, which bears the same number as the one I took last semester, though is supposed to be more geometrical, in true TFB style, so woohoo for that. This also implies I am earning more than financial aid takes away from me, which on a whole is awesomely cool.

Work however has its weird points, I am engaged in some sort of a training exercise Monday and Tuesday, 8:30-2:30, learning about help-desking and stuff, which is kind of nice, seeing as I have little idea about what I am supposed to be (perhaps other than a help-desk monkey), though does take away from time which I had planned on spending doing other things. And I need to figure out how to get futon and stuff back to 111, seeing as I have likely lost my originally planned source of transportation. This would be easier if certain other people were inconvenienced, but umm that’s not really a road I want to walk down, and umm it leads to other problems. It would perhaps also be easier if I had a driver’s license for the US, but that requires taking a test, which requires driving on the right side of the road, which requires being in a car more often than twice a semester, which requires other things, so whatever. I also just got conflicting results from one of those blog quiz things, something which says that my primary thinking style involves me being unpredictable and unknown, while my secondary thinking style involves me being super-rational and super-logical, two properties which on a whole are irreconcilable. But seeing as knowing about Vulcan’s not smiling, and other things led to another one of those things calling me a “Nerd God” who scored above 99% of the nerd population out there, I am forced to face the utter unpredictability, and uselessness of these things. But umm I was bored, and EDK had a few posted over on his LiveJournal.

I also realized earlier this week that my flight to LHR involves sitting in a 747-400 for something to the order of 9 and a half hours, something I am not really pleased about, like 777s are nice, and comfortable, 747s are not as nice :(.

Have mostly run out of things to write about, so that is probably it from Delhi.

Ze Panda

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 24th, 2005 at 12:09 pm and is filed under article, meaningful labor. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.