gwax's rumblings

For the past week, I’ve been court­ing a sleep research study as a means of enter­tain­ing myself and mak­ing some easy money. The plan was to take part in a 32 day in patient study shortly after grad­u­a­tion and walk away with a cool $6k. Unfortunately, it turns out my cur­rent sleep sched­ule is too erratic to make me an accept­able par­tic­i­pant in their study. All I have to say about that is, shucks.

A while back I put Norton Internet Security 2005 on my com­puter because I thought that it might be good to pro­tect myself from some of the var­i­ous dan­gers of the inter­net. It turns out that it was a stu­pid deci­sion because Norton Internet Security has caused me more grief than any­thing else. The pro­gram, essen­tially, man­gles and breaks your inter­net con­nec­tion. Web pages will stop work­ing, e-mail pro­grams will stop work­ing, things will break. What you’re sup­posed to do to over­come these prob­lems is tweak some of the set­tings to allow cer­tain things through but there isn’t good doc­u­men­ta­tion on how to do that and half the time it doesn’t work. So, I’m fed up with that piece of crap and it can go fuck itself.

Everything that I do is one fewer thing that I ever have to do. The prob­lem set that I just fin­ished for 3.063 is the last prob­lem set that I’m ever going to have to do at MIT. The two papers that I intend to write this week­end will be the last papers that I’m ever going to have to write at MIT. When I turn in my the­sis a week from Friday, it’s going to be the last thing that I ever have to turn in at MIT. Graduation will then be the last thing that I ever have to do at MIT. In a way it’s all very thrilling and lib­er­at­ing but in another way it’s a lit­tle depressing.