My bit for Sysadmin Appreciation Day (better late than never)

I'd like to thank two individuals for what they've done in the past year in the realm of sysadmins:

nius, thanks for keeping the wireless on campus working. You've done a great job. And thanks for helping me fix my motherboard. I owe you one.

vond, thanks for hosting Spiel, the Jabber server I use, and much, much more. Kudos to you!

Without you two, getting things done would be much more difficult than it is. Keep up the good work!

The Ticking of the Clock

So, right now I'm at Grandma's, Mom wanting a vacation after 11 days straight of work on the night shift. Though boring, I've used the time to think about what I'm going to do in the coming year. I think I've come up with a plan for the immediate future after I graduate. I don't know whether or not I'm going to survive in a corporate environment. With the ongoing recession, outsourcing, and increasing amounts of corporate insanity, the best I could hope for in the near future is programming business apps in some godsforsaken backwater before I get laid off to raise the management's stock by a nickel.

So I've decided to give academics a try. I've become curious in the HCI research that's going on, and I've found an undergraduate research project that has piqued my interest. I'm going to give it a shot this semester. If it works out, I'm planning to continue the research into the spring, take a year off after I graduate to get some cash by working at Echostar, then go to grad school, probably at Tech. By then, the economy might stabilize a bit and allow for an increase in CS jobs. Plus, with a MS in CS with a specialty in HCI systems, I might be more hireable.

The major stumbling block I see to this is my application being rejected. Last year, the Graduate School admitted between 20 and 25% of applicants. Other than that, there doesn't seem to be any hard-and-fast minimum criteria other than a minimum background that anyone passing the undergraduate level would exceed easily. However, given my relatively low GPA of 2.76 and my CS GPA of 3.07 right before I got a C in Intro to HCI, my prospects do not seem too bright short of a stellar performance this year. Plus, they require 3 letters of recommendation. Assuming I can get my research professor to do one for me at the end of the year, that leaves two. I might be able to get McQuain to do it, assuming I do well in OS. That leaves one more. I'm not sure where to get that one. I ought to talk to my advisor about this. I've brought the subject up with her before, so she might have a good idea where to start.

In other ideas I've had for the future, I've had another brainstorm that involves VTSFFC and some new activities. One Two of them I'll be posting to the VTSFFC list tonight; the other I'm going to present later (probably in person) in order to give me time to flesh it out and gather support. Until then...

In Other News...

• DSL's giving me problems back home. It looks like it's something to do with the line. When I called tech support, the problem mysteriously fixes itself. And then, about an hour or so later, it fails again. It's failed on me now, as I can't access my server. *sigh* I hate Heisenbugs.
• Final room assignments have been posted. I'm in Lee 105. My roommate is not Tiger, though. My roomie's name is Chris Breeding, and he's a Sophomore Architecture major. I gather this means he'll be spending a lot of time in the Dungeon, though I confess I don't know much about the Architecture program. Anyway, I'm going to talk to him about moving in and stuff when I get back. I have it on good authority that he likes scifi -- maybe another VTSFFCer? Hmm...