A week's worth of work

Since today was officially my first day of summer vacation, I made a list of all the things I want to get done. I don't mean the big things, like write a suite of speech therapy software. I meant the little things, like mow the law. Unfortunately, I quickly realized that my list of things is more than can be accomplished in a single day.

I returned speech therapy books to the library and picked up another book. While I was at school, I installed licenses for two pieces of software that we use in the math department, Mathematica and Matlab. They are two of my least favorite pieces of software, and I encourage you never to use either. Unfortunately things didn't go smoothly (that's why I hate these programs) so pretty much my whole morning was obliterated by the task. One of my colleagues noted that I should ask for a raise, and he was completely serious.

I mowed the lawn this afternoon. Well, half of it. I'll have to finish tomorrow.

I finished the afternoon by attending the ITAC meeting. ITAC is the committee that hopes to keep computer services from spinning out of control. They were discussing one topic I was particularly interested in, so I went to the meeting so I could ask questions.

I arrived at the meeting early, and I just finished the novel I was reading, so I pulled out a copy of 2600: The Hacker Quarterly. I've been carrying it around for quite a while, but things have been too hectic for me to finish it. Before the meeting started, George B. (from computer services) saw me reading it. Is that the issue where they hack the Cisco phones? I told him that I had just finished that article. There's something nice about running into other people with something of the hacker mentality.

Jen and Derek were over tonight. I sold them my push lawn mower. Derek started it, just to prove that it would run. I even dug up the original owner's manuals, carefully preserved. We talked about shooting cats.

As if all of those things were not enough to fill a day, I started writing my first prototype program for my speech software project. It doesn't do anything yet, but hopefully in a day or two at least I'll have something. Not something big or polished mind you, but something to start from.