Geeks and gadgets
Oct. 16th, 2006 01:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hrjI ran into my old grad school friend Jan at Trader Joe’s on Friday. Jan and I started in the linguistics program the same year and instantly bonded over being Brythonic language junkies. This led us quite naturally to stage a palace coup in the Celtic studies student organization that organized lectures and ran the U.C. Celtic Studies conference in the alternating years when Berkeley hosted it. We put on two of them and then cheerfully handed it off to new leadership. The running joke was that we held the power and responsibility – but she got to be “power” and I got to be “responsibility”. She lost her academic momentum at some point after the masters part of the program and found her niche in bureaucratic organization, so I get to hear periodic reports of the swathe she’s cutting through various administrative positions at the university. We’ve kept in touch somewhat loosely over the years (and then there was that episode involving the girlfriend … well, better leave that one be) but my last holiday card was returned undelivered and the last few sporadic e-mails hadn’t been answered, so I figured it was all fading away. Well, it turns out she’d moved (hence the returned card) and the e-mails probably got lost in post-holiday deluges and now I have an updated phone number. You see, we’d made a pledge at some point that our PhDs would be celebrated by a dinner at Chez Panisse (which is quite a touch above our usually dining habits and so seemed to be an appropriate level of celebration) – a pledge that is not broken by her decision not to continue in the program. And although my completion is several years ago at this point, I still want my Chez Panisse dinner dammit. At this point, however, SK has been added to the deal (since her PhD finally came through), so it’ll probably be 2007 before any progress moves on the plan.
I spent a lot of the weekend finishing up on the Collegium CD project, despite some last minute glitches in format and file behavior. I’ve burnt about 80% of them and should finish up this evening. Also got the slide-show and handouts done for my class while doing the burning.
It is quite possible that I should not be allowed into Fry’s Electronics off-leash. I went there because I’ve been mooning over a GPS receiver (and accompanying software) designed to work wirelessly with a PDA (specifically including the Treo model I have). Basically, you stash the receiver in your purse or pocket and then navigate from the PDA. (Or you can put it in a holder on your dashboard.) I haven’t had a chance to try it out yet because I didn’t want to try setting up the desktop part of the software while doing other projects and both machines were occupied (see above). But as one does at Fry’s, I wandered around checking out other stuff. Decided it was finally time to cancel my phone-company-based answering service on the land line when I spotted a cheap phone with integral digital message machine. (Since I needed to replace one of my land-line phones anyway.) Picked up a couple of cheap DVDs. And then I wandered into the camera aisle. I haven’t been prioritizing a digital camera simply because I don’t do all that much photography and I wasn’t quite sure what I wanted, and besides which, the longer you wait, the cheaper and more powerful digital cameras get, so there’s no rush. Well, it was just my luck that, unlike every other department I’ve interacted with at Fry’s, the camera department was staffed by attentive, knowledgeable, friendly salesmen who answered all my questions, discussed the options in a non-pushy manner, and sent me off to checkout with a 6 mega-pixel, 4x optical zoom name-brand (Canon) machine that has a nice balance between preset modes and hands-on modes.
In my defense, I’m still way below my computer & office supplies budget. (This probably means I should reduce the allotted budget next year.)
I spent a lot of the weekend finishing up on the Collegium CD project, despite some last minute glitches in format and file behavior. I’ve burnt about 80% of them and should finish up this evening. Also got the slide-show and handouts done for my class while doing the burning.
It is quite possible that I should not be allowed into Fry’s Electronics off-leash. I went there because I’ve been mooning over a GPS receiver (and accompanying software) designed to work wirelessly with a PDA (specifically including the Treo model I have). Basically, you stash the receiver in your purse or pocket and then navigate from the PDA. (Or you can put it in a holder on your dashboard.) I haven’t had a chance to try it out yet because I didn’t want to try setting up the desktop part of the software while doing other projects and both machines were occupied (see above). But as one does at Fry’s, I wandered around checking out other stuff. Decided it was finally time to cancel my phone-company-based answering service on the land line when I spotted a cheap phone with integral digital message machine. (Since I needed to replace one of my land-line phones anyway.) Picked up a couple of cheap DVDs. And then I wandered into the camera aisle. I haven’t been prioritizing a digital camera simply because I don’t do all that much photography and I wasn’t quite sure what I wanted, and besides which, the longer you wait, the cheaper and more powerful digital cameras get, so there’s no rush. Well, it was just my luck that, unlike every other department I’ve interacted with at Fry’s, the camera department was staffed by attentive, knowledgeable, friendly salesmen who answered all my questions, discussed the options in a non-pushy manner, and sent me off to checkout with a 6 mega-pixel, 4x optical zoom name-brand (Canon) machine that has a nice balance between preset modes and hands-on modes.
In my defense, I’m still way below my computer & office supplies budget. (This probably means I should reduce the allotted budget next year.)
