Grad Life (It’s All Relative)

As Jim Anchower would say, it’s been a while since I rapped at ya.

But that’s ok, since I’ve been living a grad student life, where fun-time slows and my social life runs at half the speed of a normal person. Einstein described this. If I were to go back and meet my friends in the real world after 6 years of grad school, I would find that they would’ve had the equivalent of 60 years of fun, while I would’ve felt like only a few weekends had passed. Yeah, I know, it blows my mind too.

I think I’m going to make a T-Shirt that says “Grad Life” in big stencil-font letters. Although people would either not get it, or get it and think it was really sad. I guess there’s no cause to bum people out unnecessarily.

Speaking of what grad students do for fun, lately I’ve been obsessing about why I can’t install a 60GB hard drive on my laptop, even though the drive works on every other computer, and my laptop is supposed to handle that size hard drive. The BIOS refuses to even recognize that a drive is attached to the computer. I have this psychological problem where I get really upset if I feel as though an inanimate object is beating me in a test of wills. That must be why I’m an engineer. Or maybe it’s because I’m an engineer? At any rate, I find laptop debugging very frustrating because everything’s all sealed up and not available for me to monkey with. The other realization I came to which made me sad was that there was no computer repair outfit I could bring my laptop to who would do a better job of figuring out this problem than me. Here’s hoping that somehow Gateway tech support comes through. I’m crossing my fingers that I’ll find a technician who knows all the secrets, and isn’t constantly asking me if I’m sure that I turned on the computer.

Which reminds me of my plan to issue “Not Technically Stupid” ID cards. You should be able to pass some kind of test and get one. Then when you’re on the phone with Tech support, you can give them your ID number and they can immediately start talking to you as a bona fide knowledgeable person. Instead, most of the time I’m talking to technical support people, they spend a long time going through a series of questions to make sure I’m not one of those people who use the CD-ROM drive as a cup holder. I hate that.

I had my turkey on Thanksgiving with my crazy extended family. It was actually OK, because I was slightly removed from all of the craziest of problems, while still related enough to be sympathetic. The food was amazing, even if all of my relatives are so politically conservative that they serve a dish called “Republican Corn”. Although I must give credit: If there’s one thing those Republicans do well, it’s making a corn dish. Yummy.