originally posted august 25, 2002

7

Tomorrow I start a semester of classes. It will be the seventh and final time that I do so.

Most of my things are unpacked and in place, but I've been fighting a battle with my room: despite many improvements including brand-new furniture and carpeting, the mechanical situation in West Wing is still poor. On the Friday before I arrived, my air conditioner sprung a major leak which sent gallons upon gallons of water onto my floor. Facilities used a shop vac to remove most of the water, but the remaining water soaked into the carpet was enough to soak my boxes and my clothing. Much of my clothing and paper goods has been affected by the near-total humidity, but nothing has been destroyed. After talking with Dan Askin of University Housing, a gigantic power dryer was brought in and is still running hours later. Kudos to Dan.

My roommate is still not here. He will arrive on Tuesday, after finishing his study abroad program late. I met the other three occupants in my suite, and it looks like we'll get along fine. I already know Clayton, who now occupies the single. The two new people in the double are already friends, so they should be cool. Every room will have a fridge brought by one of the occupants, to supplement the common refrigerator-freezer-microwave unit installed in all West Wing suites.

The big mission this semester: find a job. I will be working a few hours a week at the information desk once again, and I will also be serving as a TA for an intro-level course. My schedule will be busy but manageable. On top of it all, I will be aggressively pursuing job offers. This economy is pretty bad, but improving. It's times like these that make me glad I'm in a decent Computer Science school, since big companies recruit very selectively nowadays.

My car is near campus -- hopefully. It's hard not to worry about my car's safety parked in a public off-campus spot, and I have to remember to move it before street cleaning on Wednesday. I have never driven in a city as large as Pittsburgh before, having shunned New York City driving in favor of mass transit. The car will be convenient for road trips when buses run infrequently. The drive to campus was largely uneventful after we crossed New York City traffic, with high speeds throughout the Pennsylvania Turnpike. I also have signed up for E-ZPass, so I can ride on many area roads without paying tolls to humans.

It's going to be a great semester. There will be lots of room for fun activities in my schedule, and hopefully opportunities of all sorts. Let's get ready to begin.

Back to August 2002, or to the year 2002.

Where am I?

This is Weill Aspects, the official news archive of Jason Weill Web Productions. All articles posted to the front page end up here. This page was generated automatically by a series of Perl scripts.

Articles in Weill Aspects are organized solely by date. You may find the Google search in the left column to be useful if you are looking for an article but do not know the date on which it was posted.

Weill Aspects is composed of static web pages generated as appropriate when a new article is posted. It was developed in May 2001 as a way of managing the content on this site. I also used it extensively while in Japan, during which time I did not have continuous access to the Internet. I was able to write daily updates during July and August 2002, pack the files onto a CD-R or memory device, and upload them from the Internet-connected computers at school.

These scripts are all hacked together in less than elegant fashion, and I don't plan to release them. Some of the design that went into Aspects also was used to develop Livestat, a suite of Perl scripts to process statistics for academic competition tournaments. Livestat is available freely.