| A day of progress! |
[Dec. 2nd, 2008|11:29 pm] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| | accomplished | ] |
Parts for my comp showed up today; got started on assembly, only missing one part, but more on that later.
The most significant-feeling moment of the day was helping with one of the tutorials at work. The question involved the differences between Japan and China WRT European influence and trade/development/etc., and (as is the standard policy for this form of tutorial) I mostly let the students provide the ideas, analysis, etc. My job is to keep the discussion moving with little questions here and there; today, I got a very satisfying reaction when one point being made involved describing the actions of a country as not being collectively taken by all residents/citizens ("China did X" or "Japan did Y" or "Japan's goal was Z") but as the actions of specific people or groups of people within countries whose interests may be something other than "the national interest". It seems like a pretty basic concept, but it's disappointing how many adults -- even highly-educated adults -- just don't get it. The closest you get to a country taking an action is when a popular movement and/or the state takes some action; but even those cases involve groups of individual people with individual motives acting in ways which really don't add up to "actions by the country". I'll consider it a job well done if this group of students is just a little bit less vulnerable to propaganda and bullshit in the future.
I also talked to one of the other tutors -- it turned out that she'd done one of the NASA internships that I'm trying to land. She loved it -- even though she's not staying in the AV (I can easily understand why anyone who grew up here would want to leave ASAP), she's sticking with NASA and hoping to work at either Ames or the Jet Propulsion Lab when she finishes her B.S. And the bit I hadn't known -- a student who gets a co-op position (paid by NASA, alternating coursework and on-the-job training with enough grunt work to quasi-justify the salary) is gaining seniority and building up a retirement fund before even finishing college.
Finally, on the new-comp front. After a few hours before work and a few hours after classes fiddling around with parts, triple-checking all the manuals and slowly developing a mark from the anti-static wrist band, I have the thing in "just add CPU" form.
Unfortunately, the missing part that I mentioned earlier?
The CPU.
So, the motherboard is in, the RAM is in, the power supply is in, the parts from the old comp (hard drive, DVD drive, wireless card, graphics card) are in, all the cords are connected and double- and triple-checked, and all eight chassis fans are installed and wired. When the CPU shows up, I just need to throw that in, add the much-bigger-than-it-looked-in-the-picture CPU cooler and make sure it's powered (and try not to get thermal compound all over everything), and then take it to the roomie who actually knows how not to screw things up on the software side of the fence. If I'm lucky, I'll have a fully-functioning, not-complete-garbage and highly upgradeable (this was more of a priority than power right now) desktop on which I won't have to wait for the comp to catch up after every command in my AutoCAD homework. |
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