I may or may not get this new job with the Sandia Labs Federal Credit Union. They called and said they wanted me, but it's all still pending contacting my references. They don't want me to go on this trip I had planned to Colorado to visit my mom and sister. I essentially told them I would cancel the trip, thus proving myself an ass-kisser. I wish I hadn't. I really wanted to do this visit. To top that off, before I could let my mom know I received an email from her letting me know how excited they are about my impending visit. I was mortified. I still haven't built up the moral courage to call her and let her know the trip is probably canceled. On top of that, Kim wants me to simultaneously ask my mom for money for the wedding next year. I am so ashamed and miserable about the whole thing I just want to weep.
I finished the miserable Shakespeare course yesterday. I deserve an A- or B+. I expect to receive a B or B-, which is somewhat disappointing. I have more or less decided to take only a single course next semester in order to recuperate and to allow time to study for my impending algebra placement exam and to read and write. That single course will be a linguistics 101 course, in fulfillment of one of the very last general education requirements remaining. I am looking forward to it; it sounds like an interesting course.
I had time to read a bit more of the Penguin History of the World today. I think that the most interesting form of history is the kind in which a person who has spent a lifetime studying the details of history attempts to summarize a thousand years of history in a few pages. The level of integration required, and the degree of essentialization are staggering, and you can learn an enormous amount about that writer's take on what is really important about history that way.
What is, in my estimate (today, at any rate) essential and useful about history, at least for someone interested in creating art as I am, is the context and the wide perspective it can give you on things. History allows you a broader and thus more objective and balanced view of your own society and life than would be possible without. Not that that is a particularly new or startling observation.
Worked on the documentation for the MS Access database we use here at work today. It is all of eleven pages long including a bunch of boilerplate. But not satisfied to just open up MS Word and type some blather, I needed to put together a whole thing with Emacs Muse, Texlive (on MS Windows, no less) and pandoc. Now I can edit in Emacs and then generate .rtf, .html and .pdf in one keystroke. Well, isn't that nice. I expect my boss to be totally uninterested. But it was interesting to do. I have to roll in a few more bits of documentation on some of the queries available in the database; I have to do maybe a little research on this whole public video display thing they want to put together in the halls here, and then I am pretty much done with this job. I hope I get that AS/400 job; it'll be not a moment too soon.
Last night, rather than do anything useful, I watched Ibsen's The Master Builder on DVD. I believe it was a BBC production. It was a really strange play. I wonder if all Ibsen is like this. I was convinced the whole way through that every character was going to turn out to be the Master Builder's imagination, and that he is really living alone with the guilt on not only his children's death on his conscience, but that of his wife as well. Frankly, I don't know what to make of it all otherwise. The story and lines don't seem to make sense. I suppose it is something of a symbolist play, but at some point sacrificing realism to symbolism, the result can get to be meaningless. Anyway, I didn't much like the story or the characters. The young girl had some redeeming qualities, but the whole scenario was just too bizarre for me to get over. Maybe it's just because the actor who played the Master Builder was just so bloody ugly that it was impossible to believe that these young attractive women were really in love (or whatever it was) with him.
Tonight I read the last of Schaum's easy outlines Geometry Crash Course. The final chapter on constructions — how to construct figures given limited data and only a straightedge and compass — was interesting.
I managed to read about the first one and a half acts of Richard III today. So far it is more interesting than any of the other Shakespeare plays I have read for this class.
This morning I wrote a post to gnu.emacs.help about why the term buffer should not be changed to some meaningless term like workspace or window in the Emacs documentation. I briefly mentioned why I believe there should be less use of metaphorical naming in computer use — the kind of thing that calls a data set a ``file'' or a graphical interface a ``desktop'' or a name context for data sets a ``directory'' (somewhat excusable in some contexts) or worse, a ``folder.'' I would like to write about this subject in more detail.
Today at work I managed to get almost nothing done — nothing work-related, that is. Instead I wrote a 1000-word review of the two plays I saw with Kim last weekend, I Hate Hamlet and Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet). I wrote this because, funnily enough, my Early Shakespeare professor allows an unlimited number of such write-ups for extra credit, and since I bombed the first exam (D+) I need all the extra credit I can get. Nice to be asked to do one of the things I do best for credit.
I came home and installed BeleniX — an OpenSolaris distribution — on
my spare hard drive. It went okay, but trying to install software
with the pkg-add program was somewhat unsuccessful. Software gets
installed to some obscure place in /opt it looks like. Not that I
can't figure it all out, but after playing around recently with Plan9,
GNU/Hurd. Bluebottle, NetBSD, FreeBSD and Syllable, I am just a little
burned out on it all. Give me good old monolithic, stupid, lumbering
GNU/Linux.
I spent some time working on finding a blogging engine for Emacs and found a few that either are not very well supported (by the look) or require external libraries. I would like something with some bells and whistles, and not have to mess with CSS or building permalinks, but the best thing I think is Emacs Muse, so I will just stick with that, as primitive as it is. After all, this is just a diary of things I have spent time on, not a real journal with real content.
I went through about 19 more pages of my Schaum's easy outlines Geometry Crash Course. I am nearly done with it. I am more or less a mathematical idiot but have to take some mathematics in order to (finally) get my degree. So I am trying to bone up prior to taking the required placement exam.
Today is day three of taking the new drug — levothyroxene, I believe it is called — aka. Synthyroid. The quack says I will have to take it for the rest of my life. Except for some possible slight jitters that are as likely caused by stress, nerves about the class I am taking or the new low-fat diet (found out my High-Density Lipoproteins are fairly low a couple of weeks ago, and my Low-Density Lipoproteins are a little high) I have not felt any effects yet.
I got the call from Sandia Labs Federal Credit Union today that they would like me to show up for an interview for their "IS System Administrator" position this coming Thursday. I don't know how I am going to get there without a working car (Kim is out of town this week, and my car is out of commission at the moment). The IS System Administrator position, based on the description, sounds like a fairly low-level AS/400 operator's job. But I like the 400, and wouldn't mind a part-time evening gig looking after one again.