I’m feeling much better now. Oh, yes. The Java programming final that was kicking my butt last week is over; I got a B on the final, and an A- in the class. The instructor assured me that only one student received an A on the final; still, after having stayed up until 2 in the morning a couple of days in a row, I wish I’d done better. Ah, well. Still, an A- is nothing to sneeze at, considering that I haven’t taken a programming class per se since 1984. Back then, BASIC still had line numbers (remember 10 GOTO 10?), Pascal was a rigorous teaching language, the IBM-PC was barely a twinkle in some engineer’s eye, and Larry Wall (inventor of Perl), Linus Torvalds (inventor of Linux), and Rasmus Lerdorf (inventor of PHP) were all shooting spitwads across their frog dissection lab stations in Mrs. O’Hare’s science class in PS-102 in Des Moines, Iowa.

Well, okay, I made that last part up. But the part about BASIC is true.

In other news, I’ve conquered a milestone or two with my Linux computer by getting it to print (mostly) to a printer that is attached to a Windows 98 computer, and getting it to talk to my Palm Pilot. I’ve been fussing with both of these challenges for months, and finally figured out the answers on my own. I feel darn near competent! All I need to figure out now is how to get my installation of WordPerfect to print; for some reason, WordPerfect uses its own weird set of drivers for Linux, and since Corel sold their Linux products to some other company, there is no more support for the program I bought. Dammit. But it is possible, I’m sure of it.

I’m not quite ready to dump Windows yet. but I’m getting there.

In other news: I’ve snagged a couple of minor PHP projects, and I’ll be writing a short series of articles about PHP for a web development company that promises me authorship credit, if not actual money. I got an e-mail from the graduate student I was working with a couple of months ago, and it looks like I’ll get to tromp through the mud collecting water samples again this month or next month. Next week I start my Chemistry and Math classes. The creative project that Evilpheemy and I is going pretty well (and would go better if he didn’t throw me massive curve balls every couple of weeks so that I could feel comfortable working on the source book – *ahem*).

So… Things are busy, but going well. The job hunt is going… well, it’s going. I’ve networked as much as I can conceive of, I’ve sent out at least five resumes a day, if not more, just about every day, and there have been no nibbles, no responses. Ah, well.

This last bit won’t make sense unless you know us and our cats.