20 April 2002 - 02:32

I paid off my credit card! My credit balance is now $0.00 and I still have enough money for groceries. Yay-ness. I wouldn't have ended up owing them in the first place if it wasn't for the trip we took to San Francisco in January. Ryan actually still owes money on that, and as he spent quite a bit of it buying me foods and things, I'll chip in what I can.

We're done with the creepy Schubert.

Music Theory test Monday, Animal Learning test also Monday. Am very late turning in my ALR paper. Of course, Gillian keeps saying that she doesn't keep track of when they're turned in and not to worry about it, which makes it hard... I should learn to write papers without relying on deadlines though. I've actually written several pages, but they're all on my computer.

I delivered my computer, Singularity, unto the local mac store, where they will attempt to discover what is wrong with it.

If something big is wrong with it and I need to acquire a new computer, I think I'm really going to have to go with a PC again. I like macintoshes. I think MacOS actually does what it does pretty well. I think that Apple contributes some small but important diversity to the computer industry that I would mourne if it was gone. There's a lot to mac hardware and design that makes me drool these days, but ultimately I had some pretty bad experiences with this one: the hard drive died and lost me my job, every moving or protruding part on the thing rapidly broke (including the right hand support that allows the screen to hold itself up), and while it can indeed emulate a variety of other machines, it is very, very difficult to do this properly without a floppy drive (I bought a floppy drive for it, but said floppy drive broke after a few months,and as it cost entirely too much money and had entirely too short a warantee, I did not acquire another). And in my long years of computing, it is the only machine I've had to spontaneously start smoking while in use. Perhaps I just got a lemon, or perhaps I'm too hard on my hardware, but a PC would be cheaper and easier to fix and easier to placate my nostalgia with. Plus Ryan has a mac, which I'm using now, so between us we'd have the bases covered.

Ultimately, I can't afford to buy myself a computer, so I'll take anything my parents do or do not offer.

There's always the possibility that there's nothing much wrong with Singy. That would be nice.

Charspider got here last night and we've been celebrating his birthday. I made a big gooey carrot cake with cream cheese frosting, based on my mom's recipe. We played games, went out for a movie, and generally hung out. Charspider rocks.

Internship getting closer and closer. Got an info-packet about it, but still don't know what I want to know--that is, details of the project I'll be helping with. I know that it has to do with signature whistles of male dyads and playing back signature whistles to see if the individuals whose whistles they are respond differentially, indicating that sig whistles might be used to address individuals. Fantastic stuff. I can't think of anything more precisely like what I'm interested in. I've got to do more shoring up of my background reading.

Speaking of which, I've been cleaning Gillian's office in some of my spare time (i.e., when she's there to let me in... it's kept locked, and after some trouble a couple years ago, even special students don't get keys any more.) It's so wonderful getting to dig through her files of research papers. She's naturally got a bunch of things I don't have--some things I just hadn't gotten around to or hadn't noticed, but then also things like theses (can be expensive to request), unpublished manuscripts, little bound booklets of journal reprints, even transparencies from a presentation that her graduate advisor gave. It's a rich little treasure trove, and badly in need of some sorting. My pet project is cataloguing it. Hopefully I'll be able to jot down all the reference information for them along with where they're filed and put it all into an Excel spreadsheet. Then I'll add cross referencing education, and then I'll make print outs of the catalogue sorted by different categories. Then she'll know what she has and where to find it, at least for a little while. She says it's been so disorganized that she's re-ordered papers she knows she has somewhere because it was easier than finding them. Tsk, tsk. I really wish she'd directly asked me to do it sooner. I kept trying to offer. Obviously, I have my own selfish motives too. She said that I could make myself copies of some of the stuff. w00t! I would do it for nothing though, happily. I'd do all kinds of things for Gillian. I keep trying to tell her so, but I don't think she really believes me. It's all right. I do what I can. And she's so very good to me.