A Very Busy Day

It's still early, but the day so far is shaping up to be a very busy one. I just got off the phone with Delphine, we were discussing the USA chapters issue. She's a very charming and helpful woman, and it was very cool to actually speak to her (as opposed to emails or IRC, which lose a lot of the charm). Maybe it's because I've never received an international phone call before, but I've never seen a phone number with so many digits.

I went up and spoke to my advisor about my impending presentation. We did a dry run through of it, and fixed the few remaining errors that were there. The presentation is a little short by design, I'm expecting to take no longer then 30 minutes. The problem with this particular presentation is that there are so many issues that could be discussed, and going into any amount of detail is going to require a large amount of background explanations, digressions, and ultimately a waste of time. I intend to keep it short and sweet, and to fill in the blanks when it's time to field questions.

It's 11 now, the presentation is in an hour and a half. I want to try to find some kind of lunch food that is not drippy, spilly, stainy, sloppy or messy. Here on campus, that's a bigger challenge then you might realize.

Gmail also isn't loading up right now, which is odd. It says "your Gmail account is currently experiencing errors. You won’t be able to use your account while these errors last, but don’t worry, your account data and messages are safe." What does that mean? My Google account is clearly not in trouble since Google Documents, Google Reader and Blogger are all running fine. In presentations like this, I typically email a backup copy of my presentation to myself in case there is some kind of strange hardware failure between the time I leave my office and the time I load the presentation onto the presentation computer. It's never happened yet, but the insurance is good. However, since gmail is being funky, I might have to dust off my old hotmail account, which has done little except attract spam and dust for months now. Every time I thought that I could finally close out and forget my Hotmail account for good, I get one stray important email that I would not have gotten otherwise. I guess today I'm glad that I have it as a backup.

After the thesis presentation, I've got my last communications class. We're going to discuss more about the final project, a simulation of a 1970's era OFDM system. With all the thesis-related stuff to be doing, I haven't done as much work on this project as I should have, but it's not due for two more weeks and so I have plenty of time to get down to hard labor.