serinde

So that "nothing ambitious" bit? Yeah. Not so much.

I have done laundry (including a bunch of hand-wash), vacuumed, done the kitchen floors, put together a bunch of Ikea shelves (nearly getting buried under them in the process), rearranged the back room that is soon to be the media room (taking 2 hp of non-lethal damage from a heavy oaken furniture bit) (I'm icing the giant bruise on my leg now), gotten all the garden stuff gathered together and in a big heavy Rubbermaid bin on the back porch, and put away all the booze. Oh, and unpacked a box I forgot about. And shelved some books.

I swear to God, I kept thinking "oh, after I finish just this one thing, I'll stop and take it easy." And then suddenly it was 6:30. Oops.

However! I feel really good about everything I accomplished. The back room looks pretty good, is ready for PS2 action as soon as I get a certain cable (which spride informs me arrived at the office today, naturally), and although I haven't actually unpacked my paints, the table is ready for same. Our booze is organized and together and cocktails can ensue at whim. Wine is racked and the Good Stuff which is being lain down is hidden. Also, I learned that I can, in fact, lift a 27" TV.

(The instructor actually says that, I should note.)

Yes. Mondays definitely easier. Enough so that I started paying more attention to my form, e.g. sucking my belly up during a plank instead of just concentrating on keeping my weight off the ground. Hard work, but felt great.

The instructor usually starts class by reading something (a poem, a short prose thing, whatever), and then talking about intention and paths and the like. Today's was particularly pertinent to my current state of mind, and I'm working on keeping hold of that.

Carlos by Carlos Santana, a line of women's shoes by a man's man guitarist. What?

They look fab, no denying it--this pair in particular speaks to my state and condition. It's just the branding I don't grok.

This thread is relevant to my interests.

I was going to take a couple days off at the end of the month anyways...

Among the other causes of argh in the last two weeks has been the state of the campus wireless. The original[1] issue was fairly simple: the DHCP server kept falling over at the start of the term, apparently because it was bombarded by requests from all the Blackberries, Treos, iPhones, and God-knows-what that showed up with the returning student population.

So the stooges who someone has laughingly dubbed our networks group decided that the thing to do was to shut off 802.11a. Laptops, said they, would use b/g instead, and the mobile devices (which we don't guarantee will be okay on our network) will stop bugging our DHCP server constantly. OK, fine; I don't know enough to judge, but it seems reasonable.

Except that now, MacBooks won't connect. At all. The console on mine reports "-14 Access point full". They don't appear to have disabled a, so much as told it to report to any inquirers "sorry, we're full". Interestingly, my iMac will connect just fine. All PCs are okay. Booting my MacBook into XP gets an IP address from DHCP, at least, but I never get the authentication window. Myself and spride and The Really Smart Support Tech and the Larval Hacker-Boy have spent a stupid amount of time working on this and defining the shape of it, because the Notwork Stooges first tried to claim that my laptop's hardware must be flakey, and then saying that "Apple must be broken so you should open a ticket with them". Yes. All MacBooks, everywhere, running 10.4.11 or 10.5.3 or 10.5.4 are flakey because they work fine anyplace but at Hunter. BRILLIANT

Anyways, we have a theory that what's happening is this:
1. A Mac connects to the wireless. It tries 802.11a.
2. Access point says "me so sorry, a is full"
3. If the Mac has an Broadcom wireless chipset, it says "okay, how about b/g?" and works.
4. If the Mac has an Atheros chipset, which most MacBooks do, it says "oooer, that's too bad" and doesn't roll over, apparently thinking that why would anyone have a AND b/g?.

But we can't find out for sure, because we can't look at the AP equipment or documentation or logs, and the Notwork Stooges don't want to do any work. (Whether the MacBook behavior described in step 4 is a bug, a feature, or a stupid misfeature is outside the scope of my current study.)

Fed up with this, I finally took it to The Bosses this morning, and a strong semi-public beatdown has been applied, so hopefully they will get up and fucking do their jobs instead of making four others do it for them.

[1] By "original", I mean "this iteration". There have been other delicious banquets of wireless Fail over the past month.

(This was yesterday, actually.) I did much much better, and without hurting my wrist. Still a very powerful workout, and if I can manage going three days a week, I think it will do well by me. The question is, what sort of workout to have the other two days? Running, elliptical, or weights?

I find that I can budget for aikido, and intended to start going again next month, but I wonder if it might be prudent to wait til the turn of the year and not try and add Yet More Exciting Complication to my life when I don't even have a base routine yet.

Now that it's Officially Fall, the open-recreation classes have started in the gym; and today I went to yoga for the first time. The instructor explained to me that it's somewhat intermediate-level, but they do get a lot of beginners, so I could just follow along at my own pace & do what I could, and feel free to rest if something was outside my comfort zone.

I did manage to keep up, if barely. I have definitely had A Workout. I also may have done something unpleasant to my bad knee, though I'm not sure what's responsible, exactly; but it's only sore and aching, not STAB STABBITY OW, so it's probably okay.

The instructor teaches Mon and Wed, and I hope to generally make both classes, as duties permit.

There is, unsurprisingly, a lot of crossover with certain aikido principles.

The house declutterization is going well, cum diligentia. (And as soon as I finish my tea, I will be going there again for more-of-the-same.) I think it should be ready to show for next Sunday. Hey, by the way, does anyone want STUFF? We have a lot of STUFF which will otherwise be gotten rid of in as expeditious a manner possible. Books, furniture, supplies, just random STUFF. Let me know if you want any STUFF and we'll see if we can help you.

I now have a Bitchin' Pimpmobile. It's a '93 Buick Century, but it looks like it rolled right out of, I dunno, 1978. And the interior is pristine (and deep cherry red), enhancing the pimptastic feel. Steve gave me first pick of which car to have, and it was probably unwise to choose this one, but it tickles my fancy. It has a very smooth ride--not performance handling, no, but predictable--and it's amazingly spacious, particularly the trunk. It also did yeoman's service in yesterday's post-hurricane weather.

Took a break from PACK PACK PACK PACK last night as nedlnthred had gotten us tickets to the Big Event of Montclair (!) this week, to wit the Amanti Vino Pig Roast. The food was excellent, the wine was amazing, and the historic house was droolworthy. Afterwards, we met up with Beth's friend Donna and a bunch of her friends at a local pub about two blocks away. I am getting the first glimmers of that whole Being The Only Non-Parent At The Table And They Talk About Their Kids Constantly discomfort that she spoke of when she was dating J. They all did seem like lovely people, I hasten to add. But the convo kept drifting back to offspring-comparisons. Yerk.

Last week was, work-wise, pure steaming hell. It was the first week of classes AND the last period of (late) registration, and an awful lot of the little darlings wait to the last minute to register (which, to be fair, my student minions warned me was the case), and even the ones who were registered, if they had registered before July (which you can, for some odd reason) and now needed to drop or change a class, well, they of course did not have their New Special CUNY Username & Password. Therefore, all week long, the help desk averaged a line of 15-25 people with a half hour hold queue. Oh, and we had people calling off work. Yay.

This should be over and done now, so unless there is indeed fresh hell, that portion of the world should be calmer. OTOH, the furniture for the student worker pool should be arriving today, and be assembled, and I don't know how much of my life that is going to eat. (I am also not looking forward to dealing with $OVERBOSS, who had got it into his fuzzy head that the only thing this project plan needed was furniture. So now he will be expecting a labor pool to magically appear, which it won't, because it is still missing a bunch of requirements, which were in the submitted plan. Whatever.)

Simultaneously, we have obtained a deadline for when the house must be in tolerable shape for showing to prospective buyers, and it is Soon. And we have achieved that frustrating place where you have worked like dogs and packed up inhuman amounts of shit (and thrown away a fair amount, too) but the house is still cluttered. Thus, I will be spending most evenings trekking up there to make clean.

I owe a number of people email or other responses, and will try to do that this week. Mgmt. Apologizes For Any Delay.