shindotvwelcome to shindo's world

It will be nice to start grad school & work again after a summer’s break. This week, I just have too much time on my hands.

I spent a lot of time on the computer today. I woke up to a late start (close to 10), went online for a few hours and then spent the rest of the day more or less working on my website. Since I had a lot of the images done from the other day, I worked on creating HTML files to present them. I just want to present Resplendence in a way that satisfies me. I also worked on a few other things for the site as well. The new things will be up soon.

I had to get out of the house, so I went to the Y for some exercise and a relaxing swim. Funny thing is I always wind up watching the Food Channel when I’m using one of the cardio machines.

I took the trolley home and then I went to the Twiggs across the street, had some coffee and read Borge’s Ficciones. I just started reading it yesterday (I’ve read the “Tlon” story before), and I love the use of paradox. It certainly kicks Fiction International‘s ass! And it puts the Missouri Review to shame as well. Anne Waldman’s and Lewis Warsh’s Angel Hair Anthology kicks those journals’ asses too.

I need to clean my apartment. Yuck. I think I’ll do this tomorrow morning.

I’m not too happy about the former student complaining about her grade. Maybe I’m out of line here but, as a teacher, I don’t believe disrespect should be rewarded with a plum grade. This person was constantly disruptive, left class early a lot, had more unexcused absences than excused absences, glared, and saw it fit to verbally assault me. A B+ is quite generous for it is reflective of above average level of competence but it’s not exemplary. Her conduct certainly was not exemplary.

Somehow, I don’t think I’ll hear from her. I think she talked to my department head to leave a sting, to make me look bad. I also wonder if it’s attention seeking. I’m certainly not going to contact her. I’m certainly not going to change the grade.

I just want to get on with this semester. Can I have a boring life again? At least I’ll have my imagination to entertain me.

Today has been the day of computer headaches.

This morning, when I was formatting some tifs on Photoshop into gifs for my website, my Zip drive crashed. I tried restarting the computer over and over and inserting Zip disks to no avail. It works now but it’s irritating it took being away from my computer all day for it to be ok.

I went to my mother’s house in the afternoon to install the DSL modem & software on her computer. Everything went ok but the computer crashed after everything was in place. It has had a nasty habit of crashing for the past 8 months within minutes of the computer being online. In order to install the DSL modem, I had to enable some networking software. When I enabled it, I thought the problems would be gone. After the computer restarted after installation, it crashed after it went online. It crashed a few times after that. I now suspect it’s Windows is not reading the internet program very well. The crash has occured sometime after a friend of my mother’s installed a version of Windows to allow for Japanese input. Since I’m not a computer expert, it’s only a theory and it has me banging my head.

After that, I went to the YMCA in Mission Valley to work out. I haven’t worked out in two weeks and exercizing can really kick your ass if you’re out of the loop for a certain period of time. So now I want to get back into the swing of things. After the workout, I had a nice relaxing swim like last night.