You procrastinate on one project by working on another project.
You are working on one thing but feeling guilty that you aren't working on the other thing
Study
You get a 3-hour final with 5 questions or less
More than 25% of your textbook is "left as an exercise for the reader."
The number of library books that you have checked out at one time= 20
library books checked out from two university libraries, 2 books on
hold, 2 books from a different state, and 2 books borrowed from
professors... and then you wonder why you are online instead of reading
them...
Life Style
14 hours a day on campus is typical, even on an elusive day known as Saturday
You appreciate the fact that you get to choose which twenty hours out of the day you have to work
You have a favorite flavor of instant noodle
You look forward to summers because you're more productive without the distraction of classes
The area under your desk is never vacuumed because you are occupying your desk when the cleaners vacuum at 4am
You look forward to taking some time off to do laundry
Money Related
You are staying in school simply to avoid paying off the tens of thousands of dollars you owe the government in student loans
You think you should be paying rent for your office instead of your home
Occupational disease
You are constantly looking for a thesis in novels
You find the bibliographies of books more interesting than the actual text
You start referring to "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" as "White et al"
You get irresistible urges to use in-text citations in casual e-mails
You write programs for classes that have nothing to do with programming
You have ever brought a scholarly article to a bar
You have ever discussed academic matters at a sporting event
You have ever brought books with you on vacation and actually studied
Skills
You can analyze the significance of appliances you cannot operate
You can identify universities by their internet domains
You can read course books and cook at the same time
Other Entities in the Univeristy
You look at undergrads and long for the "simple life"
You can't help but sigh with envy when you overhear undergrads stress over 10 pg final papers in the elevator
People (non-grad students) ask you "Are you going to be done soon?" and you laugh but inside a little part of you dies
Professors don't really care when you turn in work anymore.
You actually _hope_ your professor assigns homework
When I was editing the assignment for the class I TA: "Applied Cryptography and Network Security", there is an obsolete URL: rfidanalysis.org, I am too moliu to search for an archive of it, and I found web.archive.org.
Tonight, when I am facebooking, a photo leads me to a prof's website, and I found web.archive.org again, I am too moliu to search for my HKU cs site, and I found http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.cs.hku.hk/~smchow
It reminds me a little dark age, no acceptance from 08/06-02/07.
I will try to be less productive in order to be more productive.
My 2-yr-old Samsung laptop had some accident and the display part is broken. I don't bother to move my monitor with me to California so I need to buy a new one now.
Appearance is important for me (Yes, I'm "full-$"), so I was thinking to get a Mac Book (Yes, Mac Book Pro looks much "pro"-er). A long story about why I decided not to buy it will be given later. Finally, I chose a VAIO. $12xx. Here is her configuration.
Sony VAIO VGN-FZ140E/B
Intel Core 2 Duo 1.8GHz (I was planning to buy 2GHz, but no discount for that model)
2GB Ram (which is barely the oxygen for Vista)
200GB HD (which is never enough for me)
15.4" Widescreen (large screen is important, indifferent for the widescreen)
Intel Graphics Media Accelerator X3100 and DVD-RAM (I don't really use them)
14.0" x 10.2" x 1.4" x 5.8lbs (thin and light-weight are equally important)
I found FZ160 in Amazon, which is tax-free and shipping-free. However, in some weekends I found that FZ140 is on sale in CircuitCity (btw, this VAIO is not that eye-catching and I missed it at the first place). After adding the tax, it is actually more or less the same price as Amazon, but it comes with free (after rebate) printer, router and anti-spyware program. So I finally gave up the better CPU model.
I already sold my printer+scanner at $40. (Btw, any one wants to buy a wireless AP from me?)
It's my first time mailing for rebate myself (I tried to buy a wireless router with my ex apt-mate and he dealed with the rebate thing). I hope I can get them all (not a small amount of $!) The first problem already come up. The original "UPC code", which is required for mail-in rebate, is missing from the package of my router... Besides, the email response of their rebate service is so stupid, I asked if "a copy of UPC code" means I need to make a photocopy of just copied the code to the form (well, the UPC code is sticked firmly on the box that one do not want to make a photocopy of it). And the reply I got is "the copy of UPC code" is required. Even my question may be a dumb confirmation, do you think anyone will learn something from this answer?
Vista Now a few words about my experiences with M$'s new OS.
Security often compromises user-friendliness. It asks me to approve many program executions and file operations. (Is it a trick that any malware infection is no longer the responsibility of the OS since the user has approved it him/herself?) The worst thing is I cannot create or delete any files at the root directory in the DOS prompt. I tried to "copy con" a simple HTML file for downloading purpose but my request is denied even I am using the administrator account. (Yes, I am a DOS guy).
The Program Menu is good, I can access my program by typing a few characters instead of finding it in a hierarchy of menu. (Yes, I am a keyboard guy).
Aero (the transparent window, or Desktop Window Manager) is cool! (Yes, I know there are OSes having even fancier/better interfaces).
Nevertheless, the cost of fanciness is memory. Here comes to the famous "memory eating" feature of Vista. After loading all those rubbish TSRs (I hate buying computer from big company which have many useless thing preloaded) but nothing else, more than half of my memory has gone! My first reaction is to disable DWM (and thought that I should go downstairs to buy 2 more GBs of ram). After a bit of search for finding how to disable DWM, I found that the large amount of memory are just used for cache, specifically pre-fetching of programs to be executed. i.e. it is used for good. I wonder the usefulness of the prediction algorithm since one often uses a fixed set of programs anyway.
Windows Media Player no longer blocks my video even it is not under full-screen mode. A high-density video explaining how to setup the monitor is pre-loaded. I wonder whether I can delete it to free up some space.
P.S. Xanga and IE7 suck! I just wanted to unify the font of the whole passage but what I've typed for an hour has been accidentally deleted! Originally I've finished this passage and my Apple story yesterday...
