2/4/21: Today I had to say bye to my best friend for a couple weeks. My laptop has an issue where it randomly restarts at the lease convenient time without warning, so I needed to send him to the hospital. I walked to Fedex of course with the wrong box. They then made me pay like 20 something bucks for their “approved box”, which seems like it’s just bullshit. I put bubble wrap in the box but whatever. I’m mostly joking when I call my Acer Swift 3 my best friend in the entire world, but in a way it’s not entirely inaccurate. I spend nearly 10-12 hours of my day with the damn thing. Even talking to friends on my computer, or while using my computer, he is still present. I have managed to optimize my laptop for myself beyond what is reasonable at all. It’s a tri-boot arch linux with i3wm, lubuntu, and windows 10. I have spent an unhealthy amount of time optimizing my arch install, and just have to pray they don’t wipe the disk during surgery because setting up is a giant pain in the ass. One shower thought philosophical question is whether the soul of the computer is in the memory or the computer, or the computer itself. Kind of like the mind body problem for computers. I still have the memory in case this breaks down. However as embarrassing as it is to say, a new material computer would just not feel the same, even with the same specs and memory. It’s been several hours and I already want my friend back.
2/10/21: I’m a sub-team leader in an RSO. We had an info session today, at the end of which I discuss with them the specifics of my sub-team. I have done this in person and it is actually very nice. A large group of people will stand around and ask questions, and I can answer those questions. I am able to see from body language if I’m making sense, and adjust accordingly (this is still difficult with masks but not impossible). I can ask people how many of them are CS majors or have experience with a JavaScript, and get a sense of who will be joining my team. However, because of omicron this speech was on zoom. When I say speech I mean speech. It felt like I was a twitch streamer. Nobody was showing their face or speaking other than me. People were just asking rapid fire questions in comments. I actually don’t mind questions as it gives me a chance to clarify it. However, I have no idea if I am asking the question to anybody’s satisfaction. I was unable to get any gauge of who will be joining the team. I was just talking to myself, it didn’t feel like I was conversing with real people.