Movin' on up

When The World of Stuff sleeps for a week, it means big things have happened... probably.

On Wednesday, my friend TJ had a party for his birthday and the end of summer. At his request, my sister and I brought seven-layer dip, which I had for my quasi-party the week before. TJ's was fun, but I got really tired before everyone else and went home instead of spending the night. Besides, I had to get up early the next day to start packing.

On Saturday, we made the move to Gainesville again. My sister had already moved most of her stuff to her new apartment, but since she was bringing her clothes this time, there was hardly any room for my stuff and my dad had to rent a small trailer. Yes, I'm blaming it on the clothes.

But no matter. I was excited to be moving into an apartment after spending two years in the dorms. My parents helped me move in, and then we went to the store for some important things like food. I had a meal plan my first two years in college, but I don't now. I also don't have actual dishes or cutlery (just paper and plastic, respectively), but that will probably change soon as I go shopping for stuff.

I sealed the deal for this particular abode with my then-current roommate back in January. My friend Andy, who I went to Europe with this summer, joined in as well. There was room for a fourth person in the apartment, but we ended up not finding anyone to join us, and they didn't assign us another roommate. We're locked out of the fourth bedroom, but we don't have to pay extra or anything.

The curious can see some pretty, pretty pictures of the apartment complex on its web site. I might post photos of our place eventually, but it's still kind of a mess, the lighting is bad (for photography), and my camera is starting to crap out after traveling around Europe in my pocket. I have a feeling it's going to be like the nimble old guy who retires from his lifelong job and then dies two months later.

Of course, some of the first things I checked out in my new apartment were the cable and Internet services. They're provided by some company called Pavlov Media. The Internet service seems pretty decent. The speed is good; they have an SMTP server; they don't block or throttle BitTorrent (I checked). However, not all is warm and fuzzy. There have been some times when my connection has been slow or nonexistent. Also, Pavlov Media practices DNS hijacking by redirecting nonexistent domain names to its own advertising-laden pages. To prevent these pages from loading, I added the line "0.0.0.0 lookup.pavlovmedia.com" to my hosts file. It's not a perfect solution, but it's very easy to implement.

Also, there's something wrong with the cable jack in my room; every channel is fuzzy. I hope it gets fixed soon. I'm afraid my complaint will get bounced back and forth between the cable company and the apartment management.

My decision not to take out loans this year means that I'm more responsible for my finances than ever. I spent probably half of my savings on my trip to Europe. That means that I'm going to be cheap throughout the foreseeable future. I can feel it happening already. Turning off a light here, refusing a trip to a restaurant there... it kind of sucks, but that's what you've got to do, I guess. I've been heeding reader Kirsten's recommendations to read Get Rich Slowly, The Simple Dollar, and Wise Bread. Some of their articles aren't directly relevant to me, but I hope the rest will at least enter my brain subconsciously.

Overall, the new place is comfortable, and I'm hoping we can get it looking nice and spiffy to reflect that. Once that happens, and once I actually get some pots and pans and start cooking stuff, things should be great.

Oh yeah, classes. Yesterday was the first day of school. My classes aren't too bad, which is good because I've had some rough semesters in the past. All of my professors seem pretty chill. For my computer science major, I'm taking linear algebra, statistics, and data structures and algorithms, and for my business minor, I'm taking microeconomics (the lectures are recorded and posted online; they're also funny). Yes, I'm fully aware that two of my CS classes are in fact about math. After this semester, all of my CS classes should pretty much be related to computers. Does that mean I'm getting a bad education? I don't want to know.

For the first time, I have no classes on Tuesdays or Thursdays, so today, I pretty much got to chill (and watch economics lectures).

As Unix turns 40, The BBC has a short article about its early history.