State of things

For one more Saturday, I’m sitting at the same Starbucks again looking out the same window. I came in this morning and despite not having been here for two weeks, it seems like at least one barista recognized me. How not opsec of me? I guess I have a memorable face.

Although it’s usually kind of cloudy and cold on Saturdays in Rochester during the spring, today it’s less cold and just raining.

My finals are done and I’m even mostly almost done my part of our group’s business project, so after I made some edits to our slide deck today I think I’ll be able to fully enjoy the “vacation” coming up. Expect lots more blog posting soon.

After I finish my finals every semester, I’m usually not reminded of how boring life without school really is because I have a least a day of travel back home, a day or two with my parents, and then the reality sets in. Since this semester, I’m staying on-campus for a few days before attending a conference and then going home, the boredom had its chance to realize itself as soon as I turned in my last final.

Yesterday, I took my old PC out of the closet and set it up with a Goodwill monitor and some cables (expensive ones, apparently — supply chain issues are the theme of the decade? It was over $30 for a DVI-HDMI cable, a USB-C cable, and an Ethernet cord!).

I had donated the graphics card that had been in it — an RX 580 8GB, which is honestly still pretty great — to a friend a while ago who was trying to build a PC. The Goodwill monitor served to temper my gaming performance expectations accordingly (I can’t be disappointed that a game isn’t running at 120 FPS and 1080p when my monitor is 1024 by 768 at 60 Hz).

After using RHEL with MATE in the integrated circuit design lab for a class this semester, my number one desktop operating system of choice (when I get to choose) is now Fedora with Mate/Compiz, so I installed that, Prism Launcher, and Steam, and I had some fun with that this morning. It runs Tetris Effect pretty well (my one real requirement).

The CPU is an AMD Athlon 200GE, so the integrated graphics aren’t excellent, but also not horrible. The power consumption is (I’d assume, anyway) pretty low (I have a couple of Kill-a-Watts, so if I wanted to, I could test that. I might do that later).

This has really been my entertainment for the past two days or so (really, a day and a half).

As far as grades go, I’m at least still hopeful. The class that I felt the worst about was my circuits class, which I had a rolling grade of “B-” in before I went in to the final.

After I left the test, though (which I had plenty of time to study for, so on the final, I felt much better than on most past circuits exams), I learned about a “grade replacement” policy — the professor will replace the lowest exam grade with your final grade if the final grade was better.

After a little bit of trial-and-error calculation, it seems like that means that if I got a 95 percent or better on the final, my circuits grade will jump from a B- to an A-, which would be excellent. I’m still holding out hope.

In other news related to “holding out hope”, I still haven’t heard back about my interview yet. Actually, the conference I’m going to next week is on the same campus as my interview was, and it’d be really funny if I run into the recruiter while I’m there (especially since I learned lately that we’re going to go on a facility tour for the exact company I interviewed with and already got a facility tour of during the interview).

There really isn’t anything I want more in my life right now than this job. I’ve said that to most people I know by now. I think that my most valuable trait is the patience that I’m going to convince myself I have so that I can use it — waiting is hard, though.

Before the job, I think things have the potential to go pretty well in the next few weeks. I will at least have things to do! If I can survive the boredom of today, tomorrow, and most of Monday, I’ll have the trip to the conference on Monday night, the conference itself from Tuesday through Thursday, I’m driving home Thursday night, I have Friday to (probably) do things at home (maybe), then I’m visiting a friend on Saturday afternoon (Saturday is also Mother’s Day, so I told my mom I wanted to spend the morning with her, which is always a good plan).

Sunday is too far out for me to declare a boredom epidemic just yet, and besides, when I’m at home I can’t bother the neighbors when I try to practice Arabesques by Paul Jeanjean on my clarinet in my bedroom, so of course I’ll have things to do (it even deters those annoying dogs).

(I’m just joking about the last thing. But when I talk about the things I do with my life, it makes me sound like such a basic sheep that the embarrassment hits the signed-integer size limit and turns into pride).

The following Thursday is the day that the travel begins, and Friday is the day that my 台灣旅遊 really starts. Again, 要貼博客很多. Maybe I’ll even bring that old camera I stole from my mom and finally put it to use.

There’ll be lots of flash cards to flip and listening practice to do before then, though, because I need to be on my A-game for the entire 9 days of real travel. The next time following this that I’ll try to be back is spring of 2027, which seems far into the future. I need to extract as much value as possible from the limited time I have!

謝謝光臨！

I’ll be back reporting from 家裡 next week. See you then.

Thumbnail image credit: 毛貓大少爺, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

…

After this post had been up for a few hours, I still didn’t have much to do, so I set my PC up a little closer to an accessible outlet and started up Tetris Effect with a Kill-a-Watt at the end of the power cable.

The outlets in my apartment are upside-down, so apologies for the strange-looking shadows.

The reading is less than 50 W. Neat!

This is the kind of thing that kills my time around now. 再見！