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This has felt like a very busy hectic week and yet I didn't have to travel anywhere and I wasn't teaching anything. Probably my biggest problem is that I have not been getting enough sleep and am reaching the point of exhaustion. As I mentioned last time, Sean has this chance to go to Australia, so that caused a bit of scurrying to apply for a passport, also to change his bank account so he can have an ATM card (thus he'll be able to draw out Australian dollars from a bank machine if he needs money). And Jennifer is off to the anime convention in Baltimore. She dyed her hair blue a few weeks ago and re-dyed it again this week so it is very blue. So there was that Friday afternoon rush to get her to the train station. My laptop at work is not doing very well. I have this intermittent cursor control problem. It was really giving me problems when I was in Pittsburgh, finally one morning it refused to boot up, just gave me an error screen (08611) and only wanted to run diagnostics. (Somebody in the IT shop there looked at it but I think it booted up when they tried so they just passed it back saying it was fixed.) This Wednesday afternoon it was driving me nuts again with cursor problems... the cursor would just drift off to the upper left corner of the screen and stay there... or it would disappear and reappear a random locations. This was not a mouse problem. I've had the same problems using the keyboard trak-thing cursor control (what the heck do you call that little pencil eraser thing?) and with a mouse plugged into the laptop and with the laptop in its docking station with a mouse... Thursday morning it refused to boot again. Error 08611. Ran the diagnostics. Called tech support. The diagnostics indicate a problem on the system board, probably the system bus. The procedure is they will send me a shipping box for me to pack up my laptop and ship it off to them for repair. So I went home around noon time and spent the afternoon working from home, did some computer tutorials, but I couldn't do the EJB (enterprise javabean) one I wanted to because I need Win NT and I'm running Windows 98 at home. Friday morning the shipping box arrived and I packed up my laptop (first removing the hard drive to protect my data files) and shipped it off to be repaired. I left the office around one-thirty to finish off the workday at home. It is nice being able to have that flexibility, to be able to work from home if I want. Usually I go into the office anyway even if what I'm doing could be done from home... it's easier to ask people questions, etc... but I do like the freedom to choose. Of course I usually end up actually spending more than forty hours a week working. Since a lot of what I do involves learning stuff, I tend to do a lot of extra work at home. This morning I got a haircut, so there I am reading Enterprise JavaBean Development Using VisualAge for Java while waiting for my turn. I'm afraid I don't pay much attention to the more formal activities in the realm of online journals... I am aware that there are awards but don't know much more about it... This year (quarter? month?) I do know that some journals I read have been nominated for awards and I would like to vote for them... now all I have to do is figure out where and how (assuming I'm eligible to vote since I don't think I belong to any particular organizations but I think this is somekind of open vote.) There must be some central site that coordinates this stuff. But I'm too tired now... maybe I'll track this down in the morning. |
