A Preview to Get Excited About

I’d play it.

Dodge, dodge, BUUUUUUUUUUUURN!

I Am A Spider

The Good:
I got my first experience with dual wielding! We did stickwork, using a stick in each hand. It actually was not quite as complicated as I thought it would be, since we did a simple drill where you gradually build up a long 6 hit combo with each hand. The Sinawali we did has each person echo the same move, and then the variation has one person mirror the lead. The way it was built up, I was able to catch on pretty quickly, and it looked pretty freaking cool when done at high speed. The Eskrima work we do seems to mesh well with the Kenpo Karate style, as many of the techniques can be done while open-handed as well.

The Bad:
I guess you can’t just go into class and do freaking awesome techniques right off the bat, so we had to start by doing “Spiderman Pushups.” While not nearly as difficult as the hated Crossover Pushup, the Spiderman Pushup looks about a hundred times dorkier. It’s even slightly creepy watching a bunch of students crawl across the floor like this.

The Ugly:
ZOMFG, four hour math review class today =(. I am so not motivated to go, since I think I could pick it up quickly, but I am forcing myself to attend the math training class that Pitt is holding tonight. Nothing like four hours of calculus after work!

Just A Couple More Feet

It’s hard wrapping my mind around the fact that MBA classes start next week (with plenty of training sessions in between, oh boy!), but much of this weekend was spent prepping Bunky’s old law school laptop to become my new business school laptop. Although the Inspiron 600m is nearly 3 years old, it seems to be running reasonably fast, after a hearty HD scrubbing. Bunky had the regular XP flavor, and since the Pitt network supposedly requires XP Professional, I decided an OS reinstall was in order.

Of course 3 years under Bunky rule is like 20 years in the desert for any electronic good, and the laptop is no different. We’ve gone through roughly a billion of those stupid Dell AC adaptors, and the keyboard had to be replaced. The battery is also pretty new. All but one of the rubber feet have fallen off, and I really want to get some self-adhesive rubber feet to replace the ones that have fallen off. This would make the laptop sit evenly, and more importantly would help with the airflow underneath the laptop (it gets very toasty). In spite of all the wear and tear, the laptop was not used very much this last year, so it really only got 2 years of hard use.

After backing up all of Bunky’s old emails (composed primarily of 50 billion shopping emails), My Documents, and pictures, I completely wiped the HD and reformatted it. There was some major weirdness with the partitions, with the main 20Gig partition, an unused 8Gig partition, and a random small FAT partition. WTH? Anyway, I deleted all of them, and reformatted the whole thing as NTFS. The installation of Windows XP did not take very long, as I still had the slipstreamed disc I had made back in April. Not having to install SP1 and SP2 was a godsend, especially since it took a while to get the Ethernet Controller and internal Wireless drivers to work.

Although the hard drive is a paltry 28Gigs and the laptop only sports a 1.5GHz Pentium M and 512Mb RAM, I am pleased at how well everything is running so far. Bunky had some seriously messed up settings, but the main problem seems to have been all the craptastic Dell drivers/utilities. I went to the websites of the hardware manufacturers to download drivers this time, and these drivers appear to be of vastly superior quality. Also, there are no longer all these strange useless programs running in the background. I’ve set up the OS for max performance, so the laptop is using the Windows Classic theme instead of the Windows XP theme.

The one disappointment in the process was when i cracked open the disc of programs that Pitt provided us with. They made it sound like it was filled to the brim with AWESOME, but the CD was mostly full of PDF files and a bunch of programs that are available for free already (e.g. Adobe Reader, Spybot, Shockwave). The only non-free program on it was Symantec Anti-Virus, Corporate Edition. Since I know we pay an IT fee, this is pretty disappointing. I was kinda hoping to get Vista for free or something, haha. Or at least Battlefield 2142, jeez.

The Joys of Buying Books

Orientation was from 8:00 AM to 12:00 PM today, and I went online and checked the booklist as soon as I got back. I wanted to get some used books for cheap, and I wrote down what the Pitt bookstore prices were. Oh thank goodness for the Internet.

• Stats Book w/ CD (9th Edition):
  Pitt New: $126.65
  Pitt Used: $95.00
  Amazon New: $130.67
  3rd Party New: $24.95
  3rd Party Used: $4.86 (LOL, and quite a few at under $15)
  Notes: Huge savings because the 10th edition is out (the 3rd party sellers are selling it for about ~$70). This one was tricky because many of the New copies were actually the Teacher’s Edition. Many did not come with the CD, but some noted that these contents can be downloaded from the publisher’s website. The one I bought was only in “Good” condition, and I suspect it will be heavily marked up. I could have gotten “Like New” for ~$24, but the IT book was not as good a deal, so I decided to do it on the cheap. Also, the fact that it is marked up implies it is the Student Edition. I’m expecting a crappy copy, but it came with a CD and only cost $4.86. I paid $3 more for Expedited Shipping, bringing the total up to $11.85.
• IT Paperback Book (3rd Edition):
  Pitt New: $50.70
  Pitt Used: $38.05
  Amazon New: $43.62
  3rd Party New: $38.00
  3rd Party Used: $35.32
  Notes: The used versions were not a good deal, so I just got the new version from a 3rd party vendor. Even with Expedited Shipping it was cheaper than a new Pitt version, and there were not actually any books (used or new) in the Pitt bookstore, so it’s not like I could have saved money on this book. The total came to $44.99 with shipping.

It was definitely tricky navigating through the various editions and such, but I was careful to note the editions in the bookstore and check them with the booklist. I wish there had been copies of the IT book to make sure that the Amazon version was the same, but because the prices were all so similar, I figure it must be the same book. The Stats book has a lot of room for error, but even if it is the wrong book, it was so cheap that the risk is not very high. Overall savings came to between ~$100-134 dollars, so I think it is a worthwhile gamble.