hey all,
I probably failed to mention this in my last post, but Michi and I went computer shopping for her last weekend, and she actually bought one. It is a Dell, like mine, but the HDD, CPU, and RAM are all higher spec than mine. I think my graphics card still beats hers, but mine is a quadcore 512MB for games, and her laptop is built for documents and the internet.
Right now, she's tugging on my sleeve and bugging me to go out and buy her a blank DVD so she can make a backup of her new computer. I don't really see the point, seeing as how she doesn't even have any data or programs installed on it that didn't come with it out-of-box.
I'm still adding books over at Goodreads. It is a little interesting to see the change in my reading patterns. The exclusivity of fantasy books slowly gave away to classics of literature and philosophy, supplemented by some science and science fiction, then the invasion of books about magick, self-change, and our perception of reality. By then sci-fi was in strong evidence, and upon entering college it outweighed fantasy. The fascination about reality led to French postmodernist/post-structuralist/deconstructionist/etc authors. As my interest and knowledge of linguistics grew, so did the number of books that I read by linguists. It seems the years 2005~2008 are relatively dead in terms of what I read. I must have started reading my way through Hunter S. Thompson, and I know that I read some Salman Rushdie, but I think I was putting in a lot of hours at the pool, and spending more time watching movies and playing video games. Plus, of course, actually studying for my degree.
I'm actually not sure where my fascination with this kind of thing comes from. Whatever OCD promptings that may or may not be part of my heritage from my dad? Some ill-founded quest for completion through material things? Or at least through what material things I have known/possessed? But I can see the same drive in my use of Google Maps to put in location markers for all the places that I've visited, in my wondering about how to use my profile over at IMDB to see whether I can make lists of all the TV shows and movies I've seen (looks like you can), even in the journal that I kept during high school, and even in this blog. Is it merely the desire for there to be some record of the past, so that it doesn't slip into the aether?
It seems like it may be due to my own view of my mind as a faulty and untrustworthy thing. As long as the knowledge exists outside of my head in some semi-permanent form, it may be preserved.
Anyway, work has been OK. They put me back with my previous class in the AM, but I'm not sure if I'm impressed with where they are. They seem more or less the same, but they have made some progress. Especially in math. I've been following a set schedule now with my PM class, which I hope will push them all to pass the next level of the Eiken test.
Cheers,
