I had serious doubts last night as to whether I’d be able to attend all my classes today. I don’t like missing lectures, as we have relatively few, so any missed tend to have quite a big impact on one’s overall understanding of what’s going on.
It was after 1am, and I still hadn’t finished my Keynote presentation for the Work and Society module, a presentation that was due to be made 16 hours later.
Then there was the Japanese newspaper article homework – read the two pieces and find the 3 connections. Going to that 10am class would cost me precious preparation time – should I skip it, or attend and just blag it without preparing?
Then at 1pm was our spoken class, which required research into the drugs scene in Japan. But I wouldn’t have time for that – at 2pm was our translation class, and a lack of prep for that would leave me in the poo. It was following that class that I had to give the presentation, then after that and another class on population issues in China, I’d need to do a final bit of prep for my 9000 Miles presentation at 8pm for Photo soc… surely I couldn’t fit all of this in…?
It’s now 10.44pm. I’m back home.
Work and Society presentation prep? Done.
Prep for Newspaper class? Squeezed in 30 minutes before class.
Drugs research? 30 minutes during lunch.
Translation of UN piece? First section done in 45 minutes after the newspaper class.
Work and Soc presentation – done, and done well apparently. Thank you Peter.
Photo soc presentation? Went down well. Got to know folks better after the meeting as we chatted about travel photography.
Just goes to show, when I stop messing around, I can actually get quite a lot done!
I feel very grateful towards everyone who watched / listened to my presentations today, they were very kind audiences.
Now it’s on to my dissertation, construction of a website for CILASS, and a small matter of a 3000 page job application!
My Mac goes in for surgery tomorrow morning. Its perfect timing, as tonight the CD/DVD drive well and truly packed up, refusing to acknowledge that it had a disk in it – it wouldn’t even spit it out!
It’s not just the DVD drive, screen and keyboard surround that’s being replaced – upon its return I shall be formatting the hard drive and installing OS 10.5, a.k.a. Leopard.
Thus, tonight I am backing everything up onto three external drives – one can never be too careful! Tomorrow morning I shall delete all my files, and bid my Mac good luck as it has some of its most prominent components replaced.
I hope I don’t forget anything. It’s the things like transferring calendar events and address book to Google that are fiddly. Backing up my secure password database (I’d be stuffed if I lost that!), Bookmarks from Firefox, preference files, flagged emails and so forth.
I’m looking forward to giving Time Machine a whizz. Oh, and the new dictionary has Japanese as standard.
Meanwhile, I’ve been preparing the Windows laptop I’ve been leant. Ouch. It’s a painful process. Have already had one forced shutdown, when the installation of Skype went awry. Perhaps it’s just me. I never used to find Windows so cumbersome. Perhaps it’s my Mac-tinted spectacles.
So yep, that’s it from me on Tiger. Thank you Tiger. You have been mightily sexy these past 15 months. May you Roar In Peace.