A *real* blog post

My friend Paul informed me last night that my blog is for posting about my personal life, not about SCPI programming and Fedora stuff all the time. So here I am, posting about my personal life; and I’m only going to do it this once… or maybe once a month. Once a month sounds like a good interval for those who want to hear about my “personal life” to read about it.

Aside. In a strange effort to retain my six years of French education (which I don’t have time to formally pursue at Clemson), I’ve changed my computer’s language settings to French. This affects my spell-check dictionary, among other things. I like to think my writing is pretty clean, but I have no computer-verification anymore.

As a further side note, I’m going to replicate this entire post in French and repost it later.

So what’s going on in my social life? As a rule, it (my social life) has been less present than I’d like it to be. Much of it is occupied with my roommates; that’s fine with me, though. Mark, Rob, and Bryce are all fun to be around and pretty good roommates. I try to talk to Anastasia as often as I can; sadly, that’s not as often as I’d like. I keep making the choice to do homework instead of spending 3 hours on a webcam with her… that’s probably the “right” choice, but I feel like I should probably make the wrong choice once and a while. Maybe I will tonight.

Anastasia’s probably my most active online contact, but there are some others as well. I try to keep up with Araba as much as possible. It’s hard having not actually seen her in a year, and not having actually spent time with her in over a year. I feel lucky that Anastasia and I are at least within a four hour drive of each other. It normally sounds really far, but I realize that it could be much farther.

Last time I was in Charleston, I got to spend some time with Jackson. That was a good thing, and I need to do it more often. @Jackson: what are your plans week/weekend of Thanksgiving?

Lately, I’ve also been trying to reconnect with some people. I’ve been talking to Jessika a bit, which has been really great. She’s a good person that I feel like I haven’t felt comfortable talking with in a long time, but I think that drought is finally over. Likewise, I feel like I’ve had a bit of a social drought with Sherwin lately (ever since we stopped working on our coding project [which Google stole!]), so I’ll have to work on that in the coming weeks.

Some of my “social” life really does happen in school, so I can’t leave it out. Being a physics major is actually pretty fun. Outside of classes, I try to do some work in Sosolik’s lab, and I met some people down there; I wrote a program for Eugene’s project and the other day I went to lunch with Sam. I’d say those are social activities. Another group of us from SPS are building a Tesla coil.

But wait, there’s more! I went to Karen’s party with Mark last Friday where I talked to Allan Babcock who’s actually a friend of Jackson’s, and I’ve been getting help from a lot of people on this package I just finished in Fedora, and there’s this coffeeshop philoshopy group I go to everyweek discussing things from the nature of existence to truth and democracy in science, and…

Yeah, I feel like I’ve listed enough things to justify my social life’s health. I’m done now. Expect this post en français sometime later this week.

And really(, Paul), I guess this wasn’t that bad to write. Maybe I’ll do it more frequently and with more detail on specific happenings. We’ll see.

Oh! And Michelle, and Guild, and guitar, and… yeah. I’m not going to start listing again. Have a good day.

Learning to play guitar

I’ve been lightly working on learning to play my guitar for the past few weeks. This is something I tried several times since I picked up the instrument a few years ago, but I was never able to commit myself for more than a few days, until now. I’m lucky because I have Mark, my roommate, teaching me in a way I can understand pretty well. I can play four or five chords now, and I’m understanding some basic music theory. A lot of this theory is interesting enough that I might start posting about it when I’m more familiar with it.

In other news, I feel like I’ve gotten nothing accomplished lately. I have these things lingering around that I need to get to, including:

• Packaging Xinha (I already make a working RPM, I just need someone to help me clean it up before I submit it)
• Finish my summer research paper
• Put together a 30 – 60 minute Perl presentation
• Go to the Botanical Gardens
• Make some tea?

Huh. Now that I spell it out, that doesn’t seem like too much. I do have two exams tomorrow, though. Maybe I should get on that right about now.

Let me share the rest of my week with you (because I’m bored and don’t feel like studying!):

• Tonight (Tuesday): Study
• Wednesday: Probability test in the morning, Mechanics in the evening, Lab, Fedora Docs meeting
• Thursday: Yoga, read some more of Krik, Krak! for English, Creative Inquiry dinner, try to make it by Sosolik’s lab. Maybe the machine shop has Samantha’s part finished by now.
• Friday: Normal classes in the morning, see if Michelle wants to come watch LOTR/Star Wars with Mark and I (or just me, if Mark leaves). Also… a society of physics students meeting/social/party, I hear?
• Saturday: I hear something about a birthday party, but we’ll see if I make it. Otherwise, relax.
• Sunday: Do all the work I didn’t do Friday and Saturday, go to DnD, and…
• Actually, I don’t think I can plan this far ahead. Never mind.
• Perhaps it would be more useful to think in the short term. For example:
• My tea is ready!

Why do my titles rarely apply to most of my blog post content? Oh well.