I am currently plotting to get Zen back on Wednesday. Based on the schedule issued, we will not be back on campus until 2 to 3pm, which means I will have three-ish hours only to do experiments (let's face it, unless there's an overnight incubation, no one will start an experiment an hour before they usually leave). Since many people just go home for the rest of the day, anyway, I think I will take the initiative to go home and then drive over to the Fedex depot and pick up Zen, hopefully arriving back at home still in time to find some sort of parking spot.
Currently there is only one problem with that plan: I don't know where Zen is.
I know there is, in theory, a depot somewhere for Zen-type packages. I do not know where that depot is, just that it's in town (thank God, the employee originally thought it was at Oceanside). The Fedex tracking system is down and all the information that the website can helpfully provide me with is that Zen is in town, which is not at all helpful. This city is rather large. I'd prefer not to comb every depot in the city for my errant laptop.
This, of course, makes it a lot harder for me to debug and defragment Daemon, who had apparently caught something on Friday and is now sluggish and had given me the Blue Screen of Death last night. All in all, I'd rather not take apart the software components until I get a reliable backup computer back.
I love how my computers all chose to fizz out during Qual Season. Or perhaps that's why they fizz out. Perhaps there is something inherent about Qual (the Qual-ness that I referred to the other day, maybe) that causes things to fizz and go kaput. My brain can empathize. Unfortunately my sanity can't and my patient is suffering. In fact, if I still have not managed to retrieve Zen by next Wednesday, I think this case may be lethal.
In all likelihood I will not be updating from now to Wednesday on the account of retreat. The place boasts of Wi-Fi, but so did the last place and I utterly failed to connect to any sort of reliable network while I was there. Did finish a book the last time though, so maybe that's what I'll do. I've almost finished Imaginary Numbers from my Beijing trip (which reminds me to point towards the poem "Letter from Caroline Herschel", which I loved, and one of my favorite poet, Wislawa I-can't-spell-her-last-name's "A World on Statistics") so that will not last me through this trip. The local library happens to have a copy of Persuasion though, so maybe I'll read that instead. I think it is technically a romance novel, so it should be very non-qual related. (While I am still talking about stuff I've read: I've finally flipped through Write It Right! and I hated it. First of all, I have no trouble writing memos and business letters, so most of that part is useless. Second of all, I already know basic rules such as I vs. me. I even know what an active voice is vs. passive voice and how to change one to the other. It's the finer points that I'm sketchy on, not the basics, and certainly not how and when to use a period. Finally, the authors keep on emphasizing on writing based on speaking style, at the same time as the need to eliminate big words / cliche phrases and so forth. The problem with that is, in this blog, for instance, I already write how I speak (well, with somewhat better grammar because otherwise Kate's brain will hemorrhage). How I speak is, apparently, not considered acceptable. ...and that sums up all the main points of the book, which is, therefore, not of use to me. The style of the book is also dull and a little condescending, which is just...ugh.)(Why can't Gaiman write a book on writing? Or did he and I just missed it?)
I slept for 10 hours last night. Somehow I still want to sleep.
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