Business (Monday, 2010 June 21)
Saw a dog on the way home today. Haven’t had my third rabies shot so am not supposed to get friendly. He was trying to poop. Poor bastard, just looking for a place to evacuate his bowels. Me too, little guy. Me too.
They mixed up the language classes today. I’m with Jenny now, and things are picking up speed a little bit. Today we covered the imperfect, the conditional, and the subjunctive. Language retests start Wednesday. The teacher said something that really clarified the situation with Astride for me: here children live for their parents, while back home parents live for their children.
Played a little bit of cards with my family tonight. They taught me a variant of Crazy Eights and a game called Cochon Gratté, which is much like a game I used to play called .. PIGS? I forget.
Something started to itch on my back. Is it tumbo flies? It feels prickly and sometimes sharper (but in French I only know the word "pique", which is sort of a catch-all "bite/prick" word). I asked Astride and Francis and they said it was the chaleur, heat. I don’t know why it would give me a rash on my back but there you are. I’m just a comp sci.
We gave 15-minute presentations today. Mine was super disorganized because I went too fast, as is my wont. I feel like I will need more practice than I’m going to get. And I can’t stay here and talk to myself in English; it’s weird. We have 30-minute presentations Friday (or Saturday?) and hopefully then I will do much better. (Or make the same mistakes.)
The lightbulb in my room broke. Actually the lightbulb ("ampule") seems fine, but the socket it sits in broke. Here they don’t use screw-thread bulbs, but instead these sockets that kind of snap onto the bulb, and it broke. The bulbs have two contacts at the bottom (CFLs, naturally). So I’m typing this by headlamplight.
Borrowed the USB modem tonight to try to get it to work. The obvious things didn’t magically work. I may try with my other laptop too, but I may just have to do research. It’s appearing as a USB CD-ROM drive with the driver on it, and not as a USB modem. It’s:
ID 19d2:fff5 ONDA Communication S.p.A.
I can try to boot this machine into Windows and do some research, if I have time tonight (I don’t) or otherwise I will try to do research when I’m posting these bastards. If you know something, please email me.
Update: I got the damn thing working. Really easy, actually. Just install usb-modeswitch. If you’re reading this from Cameroon, I have Ubuntu packages on my USB key.
Otherwise business as usual. Realized today I forgot to wish my father a Happy Father’s Day yesterday. Happy Father’s Day!