This week has been unusual in a number of ways.
Monday was *warm*. It was sunny, the wind was almost nonexistent, and we had a high of 65F! It was incredibly enjoyable. I didn't even wear a coat outside walking around. The temperature dropped throughout the week, however, and Thursday we were hit with an aggressive snowstorm. By 1:30 PM the roads were a mess, and campus shut down after 3pm. School was also canceled for today (Friday)! Both of these were welcome cancellations, for I am in the midst of a very aggressive cold...I need all the sleep I can get. I've had to skip classes several times this week, and have had a fever on and off.
This week was also significant for me at work (JDES): come Monday, I am being moved from the Electronic Design department to the Software department. Today I was only at work for about 3 hours, during which I moved all my stuff (including my Chicken ramen stash!) to my new desk. I also met a couple of the people I will be sitting near, which was exciting. While I wasn't particularly *wanting* to switch to Software, I am excited for the opportunity to learn new skills and work on adapting to a new work environment.
Picture of Chicken Ramen *My preferred variety of Ramen!*
Home Depot's online store recently had expanded clay come back in stock...this is **very** exciting to my apartmentmate Jake and I. With both of our aquariums currently cycling water, all they need is a growing medium to start plants in - and we determined sometime back that expanded clay pellets were the way to go. We now just need to determine whether we need one or two bags.
Yesterday, I tried out a piece of software called yadm. I had initially heard about yadm on several podcasts I listen to. It is a tool to manage dotfiles, which are files used to store configuration settings on Unix and Unix-like operating systems. It can be advantageous to a user to have an easy way to keep these files copied across multiple systems, so that all sorts of preferences and shortcuts are always the way the user wants them regardless of which machine they are on. This is the job of yadm: Yet Another Dotfile Manager. Yadm is actually a wrapper for Git, a popular tool for synchronizing code so that it can be worked on by multiple people. Yadm allows me to always keep copies of my dotfiles pushed up onto my server (the one that hosts this website!) in a git repository. Whenever I log into a machine, I can simply pull down the latest versions of these dotfiles using yadm. This is also useful for setting up a new machine, since I can reduce the amount of time I spend tweaking and adjusting settings.
We were supposed to have a test review session today in Signals, but with the cancellation, our test has now been moved to Tuesday (rather than Monday). This is nice, since it means a better chance I will be over my illness by then. This test will be solely on Chapter 5, so it should be easier to study for.
Till next time!
