On the way to today's experiment, I spotted a completely empty room in an area of Porter Hall that's being renovated. Looking at the wood floor and windows, it could've been a room in a well-maintained old home. Imagining moving into that office, its window looking out onto Flagstaff Hill, it was like candy. Impression: radically different values/costs/availability of space - in a home, such a room wouldn't be that rare. Having the same nice room to oneself as an employee is much rarer. There's something funny about that - spending so much time in a place so inferior to even *my* home (temporarily ignoring that my cats make my home both much better and much worse than it otherwise would be). Taking it further, many people work in cubicles - what a lousy arrangement. What have we done?

I feel that I'm being a coward in some ways. It's so hard to reach reasonable unity on courses of action, like my head is always ruled by a minority government and parliament is loud, disordered, and always in session. On some level, any decision I make will feel like I'm forcing a large set of portions of myself to do things they doesn't want to do, purely because something must be done. Amusement: even 30% agreement would be overoptimistic.

Recently, I found a company that sells a normal-form 20" laptop with AMD CPUs. Unfortunately, all of their systems (of any size) are ridiculously expensive - a decent systems configuration turned out to be over $6000. Who buys that kind of thing? For the curious, see VoodooPC. I especially like how they charge ridiculously more money for other colours of the case.

Slightly weirded out - will Pittsburgh/CMU be empty in a month? The psychology department sent out a department-wide email noting that large numbers of people are leaving for other opportunities soon, and politely reminding them to follow proper procedures when leaving. I know it's silly, but I can't help connect it with how it seems that most people around here are also just about to leave or have just done so.

Finished up with my perl Argpass module - it now does everything I want it to do. Hurrah.