Riba Rambles:
Musings of a Mental Magpie

Posted by Lis Riba at 9:25 PM

I'm a bit busy right now with classwork and this career transition class (which is turning out to be extremely helpful so far). But, instead of doing my homework for either of those, I've just posted a whole bunch of new photos to our Pictures page. It's a bit slow loading (there are a lot of pictures) but I think they're worthwhile.

Incidentally, I just discovered that if you search Google for blue hair dye pictures, that page is the third result. I have no idea who's linking to me, but I guess I must be more popular than I thought.

Posted by Lis Riba at 10:05 PM

An interesting observation

A few weeks back, I stopped my subscription to the Boston Globe. Since I no longer had the daily train ride, unread papers were starting to pile up, and it was a way of saving a bit of change. Instead, I've got my browser rigged that with two clicks, I can see about 27 daily comics (a few of them online only) that I chose to read.

I'm continuing to buy the Sunday paper for the want ads, but as usual, I turned to the comic section first thing. Aside from Rhymes with orange and Zits, whose syndicate has them on a two-week delay (and omits Sunday comics), there were only about five comics that I hadn't already read online that morning -- and none of those were ones I particularly cared for anyway (Garfield, Family Circus, Zippy, Curtis, Ask Shagg). So, the only comics I'm missing online are the Sunday Kings Features strips, and those are in the Sunday Globe which I'm buying anyway.

I'd make some pithy comment about 'the future is now' or somesuch, but I'm somewhat tired and don't feel overly creative at the moment. But it was interesting to realize that I wasn't missing any comics, even while skipping the daily paper

Posted by Lis Riba at 9:10 PM

Well, the first day back at school was great. Ian made me a lunch to take along, and wrote a mushy love note on one of my napkins. I got so wired on learning that I stayed up until 2am, editing down my class notes to a "good parts" version and making a quick outline of the chapters & subheadings in the text. (I am so incredibly glad that I already finished Working Knowledge ahead of time.)

I've got a busy week ahead of me. For class, I have four cases to ready before Friday and two papers due by 9:00 AM next Monday. While it looks like I've got a whole week ahead of me, all I really have is tomorrow, Sunday, and the evenings of Tuesday, Friday and Saturday -- two full days and three evenings. Not that much time.

Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday I've got an all day Career Transition Workshop (paid for by IBM) and I don't know whether that has any homework. Wednesday night is our regular gaming group; Thursday night I've got an appointment, and the next (and final) class sessions are Friday and Saturday.

I start my next class next Monday at 9:30 AM (remember, the paper is due Monday at 9), and I'd really like to get ahead on some of the readings for that class, too.

Fortunately, I tend to thrive on stress, but even so, it just feels tight. I'd really like to have a rough of my case study before the next class, so I mostly need to add to it from those lectures, rather than starting from scratch after all the classes, but I'm not sure that will happen.

Anyway, things may be a bit quieter here than they have been. I'm still thinking of you, and jotting down notes of things I want to write, but they'll be a little slower in coming than they have in the past.