For Good or For Awesome II

Yes, it’s true. I fear that soon there will be a death in my home. A death of a companion who has brought me years of joy, love, and utility. A companion who I could always rely on to make me laugh or entertain me. A companion who will be dearly missed.

Yes, I am talking about my computer, “JonathanKent.”

It’s been making strange whistling sounds and acting really poorly lately, so I have reason to believe that it will be departing soon. Thus, I must look to the future, and think of its replacement. Conveniently enough, April’s laptop is also failing, so we’ll probably be getting a new Mac laptop to replace that, so I’d like to stick with a PC desktop. This time around, I was thinking of finally doing the nerd thing and building it, but I’ve never done this before and while I feel fairly confident in assembling it and all that, I would appreciate any advice from Internet-land about what manufacturers are good and what brands I should stay away from.

There are some other concerns too, mainly that I don’t want Vista, but I think I can get around that if I build a new machine. Also, I wouldn’t mind a Mac, provided I could dual boot into Windows if I needed to, but would like to know from all you Mac-savvy types how well this typically works. Does it get good performance or is it like running a bad emulator? If April is getting a new Mac, I wouldn’t want to get two though, and I would prefer a desktop though I don’t hear much at all about the quality of Mac desktops, just other fine Apple products like paper-thin gimmicky laptops and overpriced phones.

So, lend me some wisdom and help me out.

Hello faithful readers (Patrick). A lot as happened since I last wrote. I finally got a job, after 5 months of searching in poor recession conditions, I drove to Minnesota with my friends for Zach’s wedding, I (very poorly) defended my thesis, and I started said job. Let’s go in order shall we?

1) Found a Job

This isn’t very exciting. Next?

2) Went to Minnesota

Oh Lord. To sum it up, Minnesota sucks. But I could really make a whole post about things that were just annoying or bad about it (and maybe I will).

My good buddy Zach had moved to Minnesota to be with his girlfriend about a year ago, and at the end of May, was getting hitched! So he asked some of his friends in Virginia to be in the wedding party, which left us in a precarious position. We must participate in it - to skip is out of the question - but how do we get out there? Do we pay out the nose and take a flight, or do we make the tedious drive? As I was still in unemployment stage at this point, I wanted to do whatever was cheaper, and Jay really wanted to drive, and McGuirk had no real opinion, so the three of us carpooled our way halfway across the country. Tom shelled out the money for a ticket, and enjoyed a quick, comfortable flight out there, but we weren’t about quick or comfort or sane decision making, so we made the drive without stopping overnight both ways. That’s about 24 hours, each way.

The wedding itself was very nice, no question about it, but just about everything else was pretty bad. The bridesmaid I was paired with was very nice, as was Zach’s bride, but everybody else was flat out rude to us for no reason whatsoever. Again, I think this would make a more appropriate stand-alone post, if there is enough interest.

3) Botched my Thesis Defense

After getting back from Minnesota, I went up to Blacksburg for my thesis defense. This was it! After my two and a half years of work I would finally defend my thesis and earn my master’s degree and all of the prestige and rewards that come with it!

Nope.

Instead, I didn’t even come close to this. Like not even sorta. Apparently, my defense was very weak, as was the thesis document itself (which really I could have been told about before I went up there and embarrassed myself, but I don’t think anybody read it in length) so I was given nothing except the insistence that I do more work on it and run another evaluation and so forth. As I now live in Norfolk with a full-time job, this would not be very feasible, and my advisor acknowledged this. So that my two years of classes would not go to waste, I am going to look into switching to the coursework option to finish my degree that way. If my planning is correct, I’d only need two more classes and then the final exam to finish. I found two classes online that should work, but I need to clear that with the department first. Oh well.

4) Began Gainful Employment

This also isn’t too exciting. I have a full-time job being a software engineer in a very cold office, since my desk is right over a vent. I like the work but you people in Internet-land would probably think it’s boring, but it doesn’t really matter because you’re not the ones getting paid for it!

So that’s about it for now, I suppose. Work’s fairly slow at the moment so I could bring this exciting update to you. Stay tuned as more complaining is yet to come!