notebookless...

to the tune of: Snow on the Sahara by Stanford Harmonics

You're sitting in a boring morning lecture. You're struggling to stay awake as the professor rambles on and on through some esoteric phenomenon that he--and only he--thinks is incredibly interesting. And all around you you hear the soft tappity tap tap of neighbors' fingers on their notebooks. Why is the temptation so irresistible to read over their shoulders? You know it's just going to be mundane e-mail, IM, or coding, but there might be an interesting article on someone's screen. But then you catch yourself spying on other people and feel guilty so you avert your eyes to stare feebly at the Daily you hold on your lap, hopefully out of the prof's line-of-sight.

Trouble is, you've already read everything on the front page that you care to (and even a couple articles you couldn't care less about). And now you can't find a way to open the paper discreetly enough without making painfully loud crinkling noises or giving yourself away to the prof.

It's sad, but I need my notebook to keep me sane in such classes. I think I actually pay better attention when I have something else to do to keep me awake.

I came to the sad realization that I may never fill up my Gmail account after all. When they first made their claim "never delete e-mail again!" I was getting around 200 MB of spam a month--so I thought I could test their claim by the time I graduated surely. Then they started deleting spam... No fair! Now it'll take me over a year to even get to 1 GB... and they're adding storage faster than I can fill it. Maybe I need to go rejoin all those mailing lists. Then again, maybe not.

Housing has been unnecessarily suspenseful. The Zone next year will have one Harmonic and one man whose name starts with D. But they'll be the same person. Ben's graduating and Dave waited until 2 hours before the draw deadline to decide to move out with him. Now we have to see if we can get Brendan in, even though SymSys refuses to tell him whether he's been accepted into grad school, and Housing refuses to let him apply. Whee...