Ghana

Panicked e-mail I sent: (relevant)

"

Sorry you’ve been sick, E*: I feel like this is the last thing you need.

Here’s the deal: I’ve spent so much time on this project that my grades are seriously starting to suffer. Everyone is telling me to stop working on it cold turkey and focus on my classes, but frankly I don’t see that as an option. If I’m not there, the drives won’t get copied.

I think the mistake here was not to have more people working on the project who were familiar with Linux. Thankfully S* Y* has offered his services for hours on end without complaint. I spent all of 2:30 to 11 last night working on this thing, when at last my girlfriend got pissed at me for this. He was there from 8 on, I think.

I really can’t afford to do any more on the project this weekend. I have two friends coming who have been trying to come for months. I literally will have no time this weekend, and still I know my grades are going to suck as a result.

Today’s game plan: I won’t be free until 3. At that point I can spend an hour and an hour only on this.

Game plan:

Purging script is finished except that I should add a line to clear the WINE temp directory. Easy. Five minutes of testing. Then we move the script into the shutdown folder and make sure it runs OK.

We will be using the Disk Utility on my MacOS install. We will plug in the external hard drive, save it to an image on my local hard drive, create a new HFS+ Journaled partition, plug in the golden client drive, save it as an image on the HFS+ partition, and copy to the other 11 from there.

After the copying is done, C* will boot each laptop from Windows, install Dell’s BIOS update, which will serve as a hardware test for each unit.

If I don’t get all this done in an hour, you guys are on your own."

This has got to stop. I need to work.

Day 1

Today is Thursday, which means I don't have class. My only homework for tomorrow is French, but I dearly need to lock myself in Sterling or Bass and literally study everything else. I meant to wake up at 8 and intentionally went to bed at 12 to do this, but kept going back to sleep until 10. I still don't feel fully rested. This is pathetic. I should have the discipline to get up tired, but so often I don't.

That is obviously something to work on. The whole point of this blog is rather embarrassing. I know I'm spoiled, and have one of the best lives anyone could ask for, and still I don't take advantage of my opportunities to their fullest.

Once a guy at a rush meal asked me where I was from. I wouldn't mention that he was of mixed race if it wasn't relevant, but it was, and you'll see why. I was guessing he wasn't from Manhattan, Greenwich, Short Hills, or Westchester. I said "New York." "What, the city?" "Yeah." "Where in?" "Manhattan." He was starting to be a bit irked by the conversation. "I know, but like, what street?" "63rd." "And what?" "Park." I gave off a sheepish smile. "You don't have to be ashamed of where you're from. You know you really shouldn't be. I have lots of friends from Manhattan and Greenwich and it's really not a big deal." I responded, "I mean it's just not very virtuous. I wish I came from a background, sometimes, from which it was harder to get in. I feel guilty, as though luck gave me a huge advantage." "Don't worry about it. I didn't peg you as someone from Park Avenue from the start, and that's a good thing." He turned his attention toward the other rushes.

He later said I had the look of a politician. I don't know if that's a compliment or not. He also said he was from the ghetto, and his parents were politicians. I wanted to tell him that he had a right to be proud of where he was from: I did not.

Game plan: erase all insecurity. Just kidding. Some french, then a run, then lunch and locked in a library for as long as I can: I still have to do work on Ghana. Every day I need to be more disciplined. Readers, even if there are none right now, please guilt me into it.

And So It Begins...

I finally discovered a potential use for this blog.

I will begin by explaining that I am a Yale sophomore. I am currently halfway through my second semester. I love the place, and am still most grateful for having been accepted here.

I will keep this short and concise to begin with so as not to lose too many readers, but I have not been entirely successful since arriving on campus.

I think dropping out of the crew team (originally on it as a walk-on) and dropping Chinese for Spanish were my first two catastrophic failures. I also severely botched the end of a relationship. Since then I have applied and been turned down by numerous student organizations.

I suppose it is Yale, and I should take heart that I am a student government representative, write for the school newspaper, and will be setting up a computer lab in Ghana over spring break almost singlehandedly.

Still, my greatest concern, and this blog's title, referring originally to a Jurassic 5 song, aptly fits the new theme. This blog will reflect my journey in academic discipline. Whether or not I have any readers, I will try to at least write weekly to improve my discipline. Yes, essentially this is another "therapeutic" blog, but I don't care. However, if you have any suggestions on how to make this blog more beneficial for both myself and other readers, please do not hesitate to leave comments of that sort.

Tomorrow will be my first post of real content.