Tuesday May 18, 2004

For the next six months, my Shell MasterCard will reward me with a 10% rebate for every dollar I spend at Shell.  (It goes down to 5% after six months.)  Wow!  So if they’re charging $2.25/gallon, I’m effectively paying $2.03/gallon, right?  Take that, Arco!

Speaking of credit cards, Jeff brought up the perplexing perspective (and I have probably butchered up the argument) that every dollar that I’m regaining through a credit card rewards program is only made possible by the fact that the credit card company is turning huge profits by exploiting the individuals who are trapped in perpetual credit card debt, doomed to pay for charges with exorbitant interest rates due to poor spending habits and ignorance about how to maintain healthy personal finances.  Hmm… Does my gain really imply someone else’s loss?

Just read Rich Dad, Poor Dad recently.  Yet another controversial book on Amazon.com.  Regardless, I realized I definitely need to improve my financial literacy.

Monday May 17, 2004

I come in the office this morning, and suddenly I have three possibilities for this summer: Roadtrip to LA to visit friends and test drive the Prius, trip to Australia to visit my brother and some family friends and kangaroos, or possibly a very lonely but all-travel-expenses paid trip to Bermuda.  Hmm… which door prize will it be…?  (My boss has passed down the word to me that the University doesn’t think I’m taking enough vacation and it’s making them nervous.  Um… okay!)

I think the only way the Bermuda trip is going to be worth my while at this point is if I get to take of a tour through the infamous Triangle… (whatever happened to that thing anyway?  Haven’t heard of anyone disappearing in there for years now…)  The other two trips sound fairly appealing right now.

Thursday May 13, 2004

My worst nightmare came true this morning (well, not the one about going to school naked or how Darth Vader is your father).  I was teaching a workshop on Audacity audio mixing program in the Multimedia Studio, and nothing on the Instructor Station worked!  There it was, projected for all the world to see, error message after error message, permissions problems, non-existent files, you name it.  Getting surprised was the worse part.  I assumed it would work like it did yesterday.  Sigh. 

So I basically had to wing the whole presentation.  Thankfully, all of the workshop participants had working machines, more or less (oh, except for that one guy in the front row who ended up need to share a station with the guy next to him).  “So if you click this button here, it should do [insert some cool audio mixing function].  Uh, you won’t be able to see it on the large screen, but it should work on your station.”  In the end, the workshop took twice as long as it was supposed to, but I think the information got conveyed.  Now that both workshops are over (I had another one after lunch), I feel much more prepared to teach Audacity.

On a totally separate note, one of my Stanford friends who is a year younger than me, whom I barely knew was married, just had a baby girl.  Wow.  And there I was debating with someone else the other day about whether so-and-so was actually married or if I just made that up.

Wednesday May 12, 2004

Anyone have tips for remembering dreams?  I still have such a hard time.  If I wake up and just lie there and not move, then I just tend to fall asleep again.  Many times when I manage to wake up with a dream hot off the press, I make a grab for the pen and paper, but by then, *POOF*, that dream is a million miles away and I have no inkling of what it was about or who was in it, etc.  The very action of waking up and moving seems enough to make the short-term memory fade.  It’s quite frustrating to keep a dream journal where some of the entries merely say, “Uh… I had a dream.  Yup, definitely had a dream… about… something.  I thought it was a pretty extended sequence too.  Maybe about work.  Maybe not.  I have no idea anymore.”   I even tell myself as I go to bed, “I will remember my dream.  I will remember my dream.  I will wake up and remember my dream and write it down.”  Nope.