Back to school!
Welcome back to the latest iteration of Yubo forgets to blog! I will catch you up to speed as well as talk about all my commitments this term, probably in two posts so as not to make the post too long I got used to just wearing perpetually damp sneakers those few days, since I don’t have anything remotely sensible for rainy weather. Apparently with El Niño coming up, though, this will be a persistent problem. I tried to go to Target to buy an umbrella, and they were out of stock. In the about 5 minutes I was in the checkout area, at least five more people asked for umbrellas. I guess we don’t stock for rainy weather here in sunny sunny Pasadena…
In other news, a few of my friends decided to organize a ski trip out to Bear Mountain! It’s not a social event, so we can’t use house funds, so it’s a bit on the pricey end ($130-$200 depending on whether one-day or two-day skiing/snowboarding), but I can’t wait. We’ll be leaving Friday afternoon, getting a cabin for two nights and coming back Sunday after sundown, and I’ve been helping organize.I can’t wait to actually get there and ski around a bit, and really have some fun with friends. We will be having meals family-style rather than eating out, so hopefully we have some people who are good at cooking! I’ve already worked out a rough budget for simple meals that includes exactly zero vegetables for maximal enjoyment :) (kidding on that last one). I’m definitely pretty excited to see how the trip pans out though. It’s next weekend, Jan 22-24, so stay tuned! I also got a new laptop over break that I wasn’t able to fully set up before coming to school, and that took up an inordinate amount of time during my first week. I use Arch Linux, so it trades out-of-the-box functionality for maximal exposure of essentials. However, it also seems to not support as many features as Windows, simply because Windows has an iron-fisted monopoly over all things hardware and requires support. Some esoteric distribution of Linux? Not so much. Consequently, I spent many hours trying to debug problems with what effectively amounts to hardware drivers, only to find options in the BIOS (the boot menu) that solved all my issues. But now everything is working dandily, and my somewhat aggressive typing is much quieter on this laptop than my previous one. This is great when I take notes in class; I’ve had classmates tell me to quiet down when I type :( I will have friends in town in LA this weekend! I have plans to get two meals and visit the Huntington libraries again, so updates when that happens. I love it when friends visit, it gives me a much better excuse to leave campus and do things, since it feels like so much more of a special occasion. It’s much easier to say “Jane Doe is only here for a day, let me go find her and do things!” than “John Smith is here for the next three months. I should go today and not tomorrow and forgo my set though because…?” and it’s always a lot of fun. I will keep you guys posted with pictures and stories! Last parting story before I go: it actually happened. At a physics colloquium, in a room full of the greatest physics talent in the world, a lecturer called on someone “Do you have a question?” “Oh, no, I’m just doing right hand rule.”
