Typical exam time conduct

Cleaning and organizing

I did a lot of general housekeeping tonight. I made a full backup of my hard drive, reconciled my school files between the iBook and the terminal server, and copied current and critical files to the USB key. I did all my laundry, cleaned my room, sorted correspondence that has been sitting about, organized books (both those read and those in progress), returned finished Wadham Library books, and cleaned and sorted my dishes, pots, and cutlery. I updated and debugged the whole collection of automatic scripts that deal with some elements of the blog’s operation, as well as email and calendar management. I caught up with all my email correspondence, though I still have a great many letters to write. I even sorted my huge collections of used envelopes, plastic shopping bags, and cardboard boxes. While I do find uses for them, I continuously find myself gaining more at a rate that exceeds the one at which I use them.

You will never see my room so spotless, well-organized, and dust free as in the period leading up to exams. Partly, that’s because stress makes me far more obsessive.

Resurgent interest in hobbies

I cleaned the lenses on both my A510 and Elan 7N (not that the poor girl has seen any action since we got here) carefully and thoroughly. As I’ve said before, I really miss the experience of using an SLR. It’s a superior tool for the capture of images in almost every way. The only disadvantages (which are major) are the cost of film, awkwardness of carrying such a large device, and tendency of people to get scared or at least very unnatural in the presence of large, black, professional-looking cameras. Those caveats aside, I can’t overstate the value of an accurate, high quality viewfinder with heads-up exposure information; a good flash with real flash metering; a high quality overall metering system; good, changeable lenses with USM drives and fast focus, even in low light; seperated focus system and shutter controls; and the existence and intelligent location of intuitive controls that let you do immediately what you would need fiddly menus to do on the A510. All that said, I am unlikely to go back to film in the near future, despite all her charms.

Magnified culinary inclinations

See previous post.

Enough of this nonsense; I should do another 40 minutes of statistics, then go to sleep.

• One tip to OS X users making backups: to backup something like your iTunes folder, use the command prompt rather than the GUI. Just open a terminal and type “cp -r -v ” then drag the original version of the folder into the window, followed by the location to which you want it copied. This is faster than using the graphical user interface and one error doesn’t cause the whole operation to stop. Also, it seems to allow much smoother simultaneous use of other applications.