Avoiding Downtown, Sort of

I’m really glad the GMU conference is done now. It was fun listening to the occasional good/interesting presentation, but unfortunately those were somewhat few and far between. That was especially true on the last day, when so many of the talks seemed to be more about CFD (computational fluid dynamics) than anything else, which is just a bit too technical and irrelevant to my research to hold my attention early in the morning (or late in the afternoon) on the third day of a conference. I think most of our brains basically got full sometime on the third day too, so we were more than glad to pack up and head back to State College!
Of course, the A/C was still broken in Walker, so I didn’t go in at all on Friday. It did get fixed around midday though. Supposedly. So I was hoping to work on some thesis corrections on Saturday in my air conditioned office, but when I got there I discovered the A/C was off. Again. But it’s usually off on weekends, so I don’t know if it’s broken (again) or just turned off. Guess I’ll find out in the morning…
[UPDATE 16 July 2007 at 8:02am: Just got an email from Rhonda (one of the department secretaries), and the A/C is indeed broken *again*. OPP doesn’t know how long it’ll take to fix it, even temporarily. So apart from two three- or four-hour stints, the A/C has been broken since July 2nd, ARGH!]
This was the one weekend a year tailor-made to avoid downtown State College – the annual Central Pennsylvania Festival of the Arts. Every year Arts Fest draws hundreds of exhibitors/vendors showing off and selling their work, from various brooms to jewelry to bowls to photos and paintings and all sorts of random knick-knacks. Arts Fest also draws tens of thousands of visitors to State College, making downtown an absolute zoo. I hadn’t planned on going at all, but I did take a gander at some of the booths on my to Walker on Saturday, and then I walked around a bit more in the early evening with Daniel, Katie & Kerrie too. Even though it’s really crowded and difficult to get around State College for a few days because of it, it still is fun to take a couple hours wandering around and admiring everyone’s fine work that’s being sold for really high prices, while of course marveling at how on earth some things can possibly be bought by anyone because they’re so… unique, shall we say. It’s also fun to look at all the photography booths and get ideas for types of photographs, frames and mattes I can do for my stuff. Wasn’t getting a bunch of prints and frames/mattes supposed to be on my summer to-do list (along with a lot else that hasn’t gotten done yet)? Hmmm…
I got my destroyed by Ben on the tennis courts yet again today, 6-1, 6-0, 6-0, 6-0. Ouch. But as Ben said, the scores weren’t indicative of how close a bunch of the games were — there were at least five other games, I believe, in which I was up 40-15 before crumbling. And my serve was pretty good in the first set before it totally disappeared in the 2nd and 3rd sets, to my great frustration. Things were looking up when I tied Ben at 1-1 in the first set, but little did I know that’d be the only game I’d win all afternoon, as he rattled off the next 19 games. Sigh. Maybe next time I’ll put a crooked number up in a set, I’ve gotta keep trying!
After a lot of thinking and talking about it, I finally ordered a new computer yesterday! My 15″ Apple PowerBook G4 laptop still works great and everything, but since it’s three-plus years old and whatnot, I figured there’d be no better time to sell it, get decent value back, and supply around half of the cost of upgrading. So what did I get? A white 13″ Apple Macbook laptop, with a 2.16 GHz dual-core Intel Core 2 Duo processor and a 160 GB internal hard drive. It also came with 2×512 MB of RAM, but to upgrade to the maximum of 2×1 GB of RAM from Apple, it would’ve cost over $150. I thought that was a tad expensive, so I did some looking, and found some compatible RAM from Crucial for $106. Not bad. But wondering if I could do even better than that, I did some more looking, and found the same Crucial RAM at NewEgg for $96, but after mail-in rebates, it’ll only set me back $56! A hundred dollar savings over Apple’s prices ain’t bad, that’s for sure! So then since I’m a student buying a new Mac this summer, I also got a $100 mail-in rebate for a printer, and a $199 mail-in rebate for an iPod, so I got a Canon photo/document printer for free, and a 30 GB video iPod for just $50! Not a bad haul, I’d say! I can’t wait for all my new toys to come! Once I get everything working on my Macbook then I’ll put my PowerBook up for sale on eBay to see how much I can get for it.