Things that might be decidedly odd…

Off the Wagon

As Jenn so assiduously points out, yes, I did fall of the blogging wagon. Anyhow, I guess I’ll just try to write when I can and not worry so much about my position with regard to proverbial wagons.

Last week was a bit crazy. My students of course had a project due Friday, a homework Sunday and an exam Tuesday. That of course meant I had to write a new project Friday, a lab Sunday night, the exam before Tuesday and a new homework on Wednesday. Whew. Anyhow, things are starting to come to a close. I’ve spent most of this afternoon and evening getting a solution to the third project done. The first piece is done. Now, I need to go onto the second one. It’s already fairly late, but it would be good if I could get a solution to the second part pounded out tonight. That would then leave all of tomorrow to finish writing grading standards and automated tests for the second project and the fourth through seventh homeworks.

Hilary invited me over for dinner on Sunday night and we had a great time. It was me, her, her roommate and another one of her other roommate’s (who’s out of the country right now) dad. Lots of great food. Hilary of course is the modest cook, but it was a full blown meal: tasty chicken, orangade, nice salad, pita bread and the coup de gras homemade blackberry pie! Wow. I can’t remember the last time I had a home cooked meal like that. After dinner, there was lots of interesting conversation on everything from theology to computers.

Sara Lee and I met up last night and went down to Naan-n-Curry. That place is great. Affordable Indian to go that’s open sorta late. Definitely fills a gap in the Berkeley student food landscape. We talked a lot about France or should I say Sara complained a lot about France. It’s not bad at all though, because these complaints all come with great, crazy stories. She’s talking about going back to Germany now actually, which I find funny, being that she complained so much about Germany while we were there. I guess things often look a lot better in retrospect.

For me, I suppose I feel pretty settled back into my American lifestyle. Germany is more and more of a distant memory somehow. Or maybe it’s just that I’m really too busy to be missing it.

Today I also went down to Bank of America, to get this whole thing with my new account straightened out. It turns out that the check they issued and sent to my other bank to fund my initial deposit had some problem. It appears that a leading zero somehow got left off on the check and it bounced. A couple days ago, I went to check that my new ATM worked and I had a lovely -$5 balance, because my account had no money and I’d been charged a $5 returned item fee. That same day I got a letter, which talked in more detail about what had happened.

Naturally, I call Bank of America to get everything fixed. Now, I have to be careful about calling them, because if I just call the main number, I get connected to an office which cannot handle my account, since it was opened in North Carolina (and not California). Anyhow, I call the correct office and they tell me I need to redo the deposit, which means paying in cash at a branch or mailing in a new check. As for the returned item fee, they say they can’t waive it over the phone, but I can talk to a branch manager to get it taken care of.

So, I went down to the bank to take care of all this. I show the lady the letter and the returned check and she gets all perplexed. Apparently, she can’t even pull up my account on her computer, because it’s been opened in North Carolina. It turns out that the merger between Bank of America and NationsBank at least at this point has not resulted in any actual merger of their day-to-day operations. Hence, my “Bank of America” account is not really one at all for the purposes of a California branch. The lady didn’t even recognize my account number that was on the form, because I guess the format is completely different from the true BofA account numbers. In the end, she couldn’t really help me although they could take my cash deposit and forward it onto North Carolina (at no charge or anything, but I had to fill out this special form). Very, very weird. So, I paid in the money again and called the NC number again. This time they referred me to the complaints department and the guy made the fee go away. Crazy, weird, but in the end things worked out.

Back on the Blogging Wagon

I’ve decided I should try to write here more often, even if I don’t have time to write a whole lot.

Yesterday, I went to bed at some ungodly hour and therefore was pretty tired in the afternoon. Somehow, I fell asleep on the couch watching TV. After that, I started on my lecture notes for tomorrow (now today), went to Safeway to get some food and did my laundry. Oh ya, and I fixed this new Ridgeling’s computer. She’s Japanese and the computer was all in Japanese. That was odd, but I did get her ethernet working. All of the words may be different, but Windows is still laid out the same on the screen.

Today I ran into Mike Brudno, which was odd, but somehow fitting. The first time I was a TA was when I worked for Mike when he was the 61B instructor back in summer 2000. We talked about what’s going on with us and a bit about 61B. I hardly recognized him at first, because he didn’t look as dissheveled as he used to. I guess he’s coming back to Berkeley to do a postdoc here, now that he’s finished his PhD at Stanford. I only hope I can follow in his footsteps once again and get out of grad in school in four years myself. Well, at least for years from now.

Updates

A lot has happened in the past couple days. All the exams for my class have been graded and handed back now plus the next project and homework are done too. And of course, I have today’s lecture notes done too. Busy, busy, but productive.

Anyhow, tonight I also got elected board rep for Ridge House. I don’t think I’ve ever really run for any office, at least not of my own volition. When I became president years ago, it was because Susana Maldonado nominated and advocated for my election, while I was away in Germany. It worked out well though. Board should be a nice change from scrubbing the oven, but I really do like working at the central USCA level. There’s only 5 weeks really left in the summer semester, but that’s ok I guess.

Last night I put my old Ridgeling knowledge to work. The ethernet was down and nobody knew what was going on. Well, it turned out that the breaker for the ethernet closet had flipped, shutting off power to the NAT box. That breaker though suspiciously is not actually located inside Ridge, but rather CZ. A quick visit to the Republic of Krackistan (sp?) and everything was once again in order.

So Tired

Despite the long weekend, this week has been just crazy. The first midterm for my course was on Wednesday and there’s just been a lot of additional work from writing and now grading it. The first project is due tomorrow, so of course something had to break with the submission software. Hopefully, instructional will fix it. I’m really running out of patience with them sometimes. In one of the recent emails I got from them, they mentioned how at least when they change things during the summer there’s only 4 classes. Well, during the 1 month between the spring semester and the 8-week summer session, there are 0 classes. Maybe they should consider changing things over then. But alas, summer school is pretty much just taught by graduate students, so I guess they don’t really have to worry as much about the consequences of screwing up.

Tonight I need to get the spec for hw2 out to the readers, so that they can get started on it. At least there’s no lecture tomorrow. Hopefully, I’ll be able to get a full night’s sleep tonight for the first time in a while.

For 4th of July, I went over to a BBQ at Jason’s. Of course, the usual characters of Aaron and Kevin were there to keep me company. Stephen was also there in the beginning and I hadn’t seen him since I’d been back. Most interestingly I ran into Hae-Eun (a friend of Kendra’s friend Randy that I knew through my old friend from high school Rebekah) there too. I don’t think I’d seen her in at least 5 years. Weird, but cool.