Cotton

Last night I ended up playing dress up and going out to dinner with some people. I didn't know many of the people there that well, but it was a fun crowd. I was put to shame in my ECE identity, though, trying to explain how processors work ("Well, there's this thing called a transistor, and you can build logic gates, and...") - it almost, almost made me miss 240 and wish I was a sophomore again. Almost.

Today I got up and tried to do some reading for class. We're reading this book on the Cotton Gin for one of my history classes, and it's really dry (no pun intended). Seriously, though. The author is making a reasonably well grounded argument but she's also trying to make some points that are a bit of a stretch and ignore the real root of some issues...and really, it just makes her book nearly impossible to read. She jumps from talking about 12th century India to 17th century Britain to 16th century China. Meh. At least it means that when we get to write the paper I'll have enough frustration stored up to write something quasi-snarky and intelligent sounding.

Anyway, I was sitting in Starbucks trying to read and ended up chatting for awhile with one of the girls I had class with last semester who was randomly there after her cello lesson. It was cool, and I got to hear about her time abroad in China this past summer...and she's studying in Germany next semester. Some people have all the fun...

Then I headed over to an event on campus where I ended up hearing this old guy who graduated from CMU sometime in the 70's telling a bunch of crazy CMU stories. I also got to hang out with other people I don't see much and catch up on life a bit...a good afternoon, even if I ended up feeling like a bit of a slacker. :-P

Then I came home and wrote two short papers for class, and went to dinner. Then I read some more of that godawful Cotton Gin treatise and got through enough for Monday.

I guess today's actually been remarkably productive, even though it didn't really feel that way, I guess just from being really distracted. I haven't been thinking about anything in particular; it's just been impossible to focus.

Oh and it turns out that using an Ethernet hub with Comcast is a bad idea, because Comcast only allows one IP address per modem...which I guess actually does make a lot of sense, and explains why only one internet connection worked, and is a lot easier to fix and deal with than a shorted socket.