Status: packing
Sometimes (like right now) I feel my life can be defined by my current state of packing. This past weekend was “packing”, yesterday was “unpacking”, today will be “organizing”, and Thursday will be “repacking”.
Now that I’ve completed my undergrad degree (pending, of course, successful completion of ECON 102), it only seems fit to tally up the packing slip over the past 5 years (with apologies to Cecilia). My parents and I have packed the van 18 times, making trips to Waterloo, Toronto, Windsor, and Ottawa, and I’ve packed for California flights 4 times, about to start my fifth. Hip-hip hooray for co-op!
The days since the end of my exams have been very full. It seemed like Friday through Sunday were spent alternately playing clarinet at St. Jerome’s (my mouth hurts) (behave – this is a family-oriented blog!) and packing the van with my folks. Said goodbye to Connie and Bill (respectively the flautist and guitarist in the St. Jerome’s 9:30 choir). Spent a fun Sunday afternoon / evening illin’ and chillin’ with Scott. We made the dock in Mac OS X do crazy things (read more if you really care). We also came across a great puzzle program called Polyominoes, which is highly addictive.
Monday was my last Senate meeting, although the provost forgot to mention that at the beginning when he was announcing everyone else’s names (grrrr…). The most interesting thing we talked about were class grade changing policies. This meeting, there were debates, motions, and votes, oh my! One of the faculties had a policy that allowed the Dean to be the final authority on class grade changes and in another the committee structure wasn’t well-defined; a motion by my colleague Stephen Skrzydlo (the other half of SSSDSSS Consulting) sent the latter back the committee and the former was downright rejected. Yay students!
And now I’m in Windsor, typing away late one Tuesday night. Spent the evening with my friends Katie and Allison. (For the Waterloo readers, Katie has been my enemy and friend since grade 1, and Allison has been a good friend since high school.) We stalked a guy that Katie likes; it was fun. Both recently came across their pictures on this website and were amazed – they’re not geeks like the rest of us.
Well that’s enough mindless dribble for tonight. Live, from Windsor, Ontario, this is Tuesday night!
Appendix
Crazy things in the Mac OS X dock: Suppose you have a shell script that you want to launch from the dock. What you can do is take an existing application bundle (say, Clock.app), copy it to a new location. Delete Clock.app/Contents/MacOS/Clock and replace it with a shell script that does whatever you want. Change the name of Clock.app to Whatever.app (and Contents/MacOS/Clock to Contents/MacOS/Whatever) and – voilà – a shell script launcher. You can put it in the dock and it will bounce until the shell script is completed. I was pretty impressed that that hack actually worked.
Comment by Jesse
Let me be the first to say in this medium that Douglas Stebila was a very good Senator. I’m glad that your last Senate meeting (unless you return for a PhD and sit as a grad rep 
) was a decent meeting.
Comment by Lino
Mindless dribble? Thanks Doug.
Comment by Ian MacKinnon
Doug, congratulations on your graduation (pending econ102 of course). You da man.
