I bought my current laptop back in 2006 or 2007. It was rather cheap, because life onboard ship is hard on electronics, so I didn't want to spend a lot of money on an item that was at daily risk of destruction.

It is still going strong, except the battery is dead. Even idling, the battery dies in less than 15 minutes. Sleep mode can be sustained for only an hour. I have to plug it in whenever I want to use it. It's still useful in some circumstances, as it is much more portable than my desktop machine; but it's utility in the academic setting is limited by the need to keep it plugged in at all times.

Thus I had to decide between getting a new battery and getting a whole new laptop. For $500-$700 I could get a low-end "ultrabook" which would be much lighter and yet still more powerful, with the benefit of half a decade of Moore's Law. But the old one's resale value is very very low, and it hurts my soul to throw it away. It's not like I need more processing power anyway, as I use it for office tasks and watching videos, not playing games or anything else processor-intensive.

Shopping for a new battery, I discovered I could buy an off-brand replacement battery for about $70, an official HP replacement for $90… or an official high-power battery (with twice the life) for $95.

Having received the new battery today, I am guessing the reason the high-power one is cheaper is that it was repatriated from a market where it was overstocked. The battery was made in China, but the packaging was all in Portuguese. The Brazilian market's loss is my gain.

I'm looking forward to seeing how long the laptop can run now. It will be lovely to do presentations without needing to stretch an extension cord to the nearest outlet.

Posted by: Boviate at 06:27 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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We live in a time where we can review "live" works of art that happened in the past. It's kind of strange, really, what can be done with that ability.

Posted by: Boviate at 01:37 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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My girlfriend's birthday falls unfortunately close to America's most important secular holiday, Super Bowl Sunday. I am told that, in the past, this was annoying to her, because not everyone wants to go to a Superbowl party and a birthday party the same week.

So the parties have been combined. The plan was to have the Puppy Bowl on the upstairs TV and the Super Bowl on the downstairs TV, but the flaw in that was that people were more interested in socializing than anything else, and breaking the party in half did not advance that goal. There were about a dozen people, which is enough that both groups could have maintained minimum social mass, but it didn't happen. Perhaps next year we shall drag the upstairs TV down to the living room, and have both shows in the same field of view. The Puppy Bowl audio track isn't really all that important anyway.

There was the obligatory mountain of food, which is to say we still have multiple pounds of chips left over. Luckily chips take a while to go bad.

Posted by: Boviate at 07:16 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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In the Corps, the part of my job that consisted of actual work on things was about 30% unscheduled repairs and 70% scheduled maintenance. Dealing with all that scheduled maintenance required careful checklists of when things were due.

Thus, when I was applying to multiple MA programs, I created a long and complex checklist on a spreadsheet. It had every school I was applying to and what materials each school needed and when they needed them. I would check off each subtask and note when I had completed it. ("Statement of purpose to Drew: Due 1 Mar. Sent 14 Feb.")

Last semester was a stressful one, so I just reused the document. Most things were the same, in fact– they all still needed GREs, three letters of reference, etc. The only major change was a longer writing sample, but I already know what I was going to use: the paper I'd produced in my most recent research seminar.

However, I made an inexcusable mistake. The kind of mistake that, had this been in fact a maintenance checklist, could have resulted in serious consequences.

I failed to update the deadlines.

You see, MA programs tend to have admission deadlines of either March 1st or March 15th. PhD programs, however, have deadlines of either Dec 1st or Dec 15th. One reason is that some marginal candidates are not accepted into PhD programs but are offered MA slots. Another reason is that the two programs have very different funding implications for the university.

So, to summarize, I had chosen to work on my PhD admission once the new year started. Here it is, and I discover I am too late. I will be applying now for admission into the classes that start in September 2013.

I do have several different options.

1. I can take my MA and get a real job, skipping on a PhD that hardly offers a guarantee of success anyway. (I'm not sufficiently arrogant to simply assume that I'm a shoo-in for admission.)
   
2. I can work for a year, then restart school in September 2013.
3. PhD students are required to do one more semester of classwork beyond MAs. I could take that semester as a non-admitted student, and spend the next semester working on the language skills I will need for the PhD. Basically, I would be investing a year of time in the hopes of getting admitted. The downside of this is that the classwork semester is only useful if I continue my studies at UB. If I join a program elsewhere, graduate schools are not very big on transfer credits. The language skills, however, would always be useful.
   

Posted by: Boviate at 04:28 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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My sister's house is on the top of a hill. This makes sledding very impressive.

Posted by: Boviate at 10:31 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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Whew, just submitted the last paper of the semester, a full half-hour before the deadline. Tomorrow I pack, bake cookies and mail them to Afghanistan, wrap presents, take my girlfriend out to dinner, then drive to the ancestral homeland to see my sisters and their families. Busy busy busy.

Posted by: Boviate at 11:47 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Right in the middle of finals week, the substation that powers my university's main campus shut down for two hours. (Cause as yet unknown, my money's on "suicidal squirrel"). I'm signed up to a system where the university can send out emergency alert text messages. But the text about the power outage didn't arrive until the power had been restored! According to someone that knows, the problem is that the emergency alert system is run by a computer on campus. Sensibly, that computer has a UPS to keep it going without power. But, the sequence of routers through which the computer communicates requires external power. Whoops!

Posted by: Boviate at 03:10 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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I might be about to get a degree, accidentally. My MA project is not yet complete, although my classwork is. (Or will be, when I turn in all my term papers. Unlike a cousin who will not be named.)

But I'm on a list to graduate in early February. My hypothesis is as follows: My MA adviser is also the department's Director of Undergraduate Studies, and is fighting a losing battle with paperwork. As I'm a good student, she might have just signed off some paperwork with my name on it without thoroughly reading.

Even though I'm on the list, I sent an email to the graduate secretary pointing out the error and told my adviser too. Also, there are a couple of layers of auditing before any sheepskins are mailed. So this might be nothing. But if I get awarded a degree without completing the work, I'll be quite embarrassed. I will be completing the project regardless, because I don't intend to cheat myself, and claiming a degree that I did not earn is fraud, even if the granting institution thinks I deserved it. I also don't think I'd get very good letters of recommendation if I received a degree incorrectly and just kind of quietly slunk away. Plus, at any future date an audit might discover the mistake and retract the diploma, to everyone's embarrassment.

Posted by: Boviate at 05:52 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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I gave blood earlier this week. That's not such a big thing, I realize. But it was the first time I've donated since 2003, I think. The problem was my time in the Corps included stints in places with endemic mosquito-borne diseases. Before taking my blood, the experts wanted to ensure that if I'd picked up any nasty viruses, bacteria, or parasites, they would have either showed themselves or been destroyed by my immune system. That requires waiting several years.

As always, the most painful part of the process is when they rip the tape off my hairy arms near the end. I don't mind the needle stick, it's that tape coming off that hurts so much.

Posted by: Boviate at 04:26 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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My roommate is currently eating dinner with a girl on our kitchen table, while a friend films them both. It's part of the filming friend's class project. Now I feel terrible about how messy the kitchen is. I've got stuff just sitting on that table! The floor needs waxed! And the slovenly state of my quarters is being preserved on film forever! AAAAAGH!

Posted by: Boviate at 05:15 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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