silveradept | The papers, they pile up!

The readings are on-line, which is good. The assignments are on-line, which can be the cause of misguided panic (ref. me staying up until one-thirty this morning to finish an assignment that's not due until next week). I get slide handouts in lecture and more handouts in discussion. I think I'm swimming in a sea of papers. I'll need some binders. And then, there are the assignments that I have not yet done. You know, the "short" 6-8 page papers that are going to start intruding on my life soon. It's going to be a bit of a balancing act to see whether I can get everything done that I'm supposed to at the right times.

Today was an eventful day. While checking to see that my MP3 player worked, I turned it into a Rio Shuffle by dropping it on the pavement. Much of the LCD no longer works, although the LC part didn't leak out or anything. (Speaking of MP3 players, apparently the size does matter when it comes to players. "My iPod is THIS BIG!" Trick is, 1,000, 10,000 or more songs, the average user puts on... about 400 or so.) That was this morning, so today could have been a really bad day. Then, it got better. The assignment I'd panicked over isn't due until next week. Which gives me a whole week to polish it nicely and then forget about it until I need to turn it in. I used my normal wit, charm, self-deprecating humor and other conversational techniques, and, well, at least I didn't have the cops called on me. Am I mad? Or just someone who, for whatever reason, looks at the world while trying to walk on his hands? Maybe we're all just a little mad.

Anyway - the day continues. My schedule conflicts clear themselves up through other conflicts being inflicted on someone else. My throat is sore, but we win the volleyball game tonight (although to go to that, I skipped the umpires' meeting. I'm cutting back a bit on my extracurriculars until I get a firmer grasp of what grad school demands from me.) I got picked, as unlikely as it is, as the "Fan of the game" tonight, which netted a cute radio, and I caught the T-shirt tossed into the Zone section. Just closed my hand on it, really, as everyone else took a swipe at it. Really rather funny, because that's how I caught the last one, too, by just sticking my hand up and closing it on the shirt when it came... although the last one was a bit better circus catch involving a deflection and the height of my reach.

And then I get back to find that I inspired

urbankotq to write-up an entry on the Google results of "pillow" in the style of my link-riddled entries. He actually provides a link to A Godfather sort of pillow, a sushi/sashimi lover's pillow, and a tech nerd's dream pillow. He's right - there's a lot of strange stuff out there that you can get just by Googling common words. Of course, as

las proves, one need not go out too far into the world to find odd and possibly repulsive things. Like ambulance-chasers in that place in Ohio. You know the one, with the... the... the trees with the nuts and the school there. Yeah. That place. She also proves that one need not venture outside the confines of one's brain to think up genius primetime programming.

There's some scary stuff going on in other brains as well, like the one that want to potentially give commanders the option to pre-emptively strike with nukes. The ones that appear to be discussed in the article are bunker-busters, which are tactical nuclear weapons, correct? (Is it also true that tac nukes don't disperse as much material around the area, having a lower payload and destructive power?) Microsoft, too, has scary brains when they throw a fit over the decision of Massachusetts to use an open document standard as their document standard. It is, of course, incompatible with Microsoft products, mostly because Microsoft doesn't want to be compatible, they want things done their way. One might make a very crude remark about how Microsoft's unwillingness to share anything that they've done is what has made them so vulnerable to exploitation in their security. That exercise is, of course, left to the reader, mostly because I suspect my readership is far better at creative insults than I am.

And thus, it's time for bed.