Today marks my first week back in sunny California. Actually, scratch the "sunny" part — it's rained here almost every day since I arrived. It's still nice to be somewhere where the average daily temperature has more than one digit, though.

Class is exactly as I remembered it. Hours drag by, but days seem to end almost without beginning in the first place. I'm staying on top of my homework, which is a good thing. We'll see how well I can keep that up, particularly when biology and STEMS (signals and systems engineering) start to load it on.

I've also started a new job here at HMC. I've joined the Computer Science department staff, which is awesome. I've always enjoyed systems administration, and now I get to do it for a large and sophisticated network. So far I've identified and provided a solution for a misbehaving compiler problem on the CS105 machine, and helped Yaniv rewrite the kiosk to be valid (and working) HTML/CSS/JavaScript. Not a huge list of a achievements, I'll admit, but I've only been doing stuff for a few days.

Speaking of computers, I've got a new face returning to my stable of productive machines: an Apple Newton MessagePad 2100. I just purchased one off of eBay to replace the one that got broken at Durfee, and so far it's working out great. I never will cease to be amazed at how incredible the handwriting recognition is, or how perfect the form-factor is for good handwriting recognition. I've got a LAN card coming in next week, so maybe I'll even be able to bring it into the 21st Century. Cool, no?

Not everything is sunny in the world of computing. A recent Gentoo change (unwisely pushed out to ~x86 and ~amd64, in my opinion) caused keyboard mappings to come from HAL, which had the end effect of completely breaking my keyboard under X. Yes, it's possible to fix with a clever combination of .fdi files and a corrected Xmodmap, but the problem should not have happened in the first place. Silly devs. If you're afflicted, this bugzilla thread should help.

Okay, enough procrastination. I suppose I'm going to go do some more work. Good bye, reader.

PS: Feel free to add a Comment, if you exist. I have strong suspicions that you do not...