Finishing papers means more sanity.

April 27, 2003

My project is finished. Thank the various Gods, my project is finished. I just completed one of the biggest and most stressful projects that Beloit College offers, and it’s like a huge weight has been lifted from my shoulders. I’m not completely done, of course, but that was the biggest thing left that I had to do. I ended up with 32 pages including the table of contents but not the title page, around 35 tables, 25 graphs, and 5 pages of data in the appendix. I had to print out two copies of it for the professor, so on a gamble, I took my laptop over to the computer lab in the Economics and Sociology building and hooked it up to the network. Thankfully, the printer in there didn’t require a username/password (or if it did, my connecting to it with the same username/password for the computers in the lab helped), so I could print straight from my laptop. This had been worrying me for two reasons. The first is that I’d rather not waste more than 60 pages of paper and the associated toner that goes with it from my personal laser printer. My printer is five years old now, one of the paper trays is broken, others pieces are chipped, stained (I still find blender splatters on it once in awhile in random places), and of course my personal favorite–it prints at an angle. Not really visible, but it’s enough most of the time that you question whether you’re seeing things. Just a slight few degrees off, nothing more (although occasionally it does get REALLY off kilter), but it’s not terribly professional-looking. I also don’t know how much toner I have left. As I said, I’ve had this printer for five years now, and I haven’t once had to change the toner. It’s pretty amazing, actually. I’ve put this thing through four years of college and all the associated papers (I could actually go through my saved documents and find out exactly how many pages I’ve printed academically), plus other people using it, plus random things printed. That’s pretty good, actually, and not many people believe me. I think I have the magic toner cartridge, like the urban legend about the car that someone buys that gets 100 MPG, and then it gets recalled and they get back a gas guzzler–like the company didn’t want them to have a fuel-efficient car. Anyhow, I have the bottomless toner cartridge that NEC didn’t want anyone to have. You know the old joke about rich people and new cars? “Oh, the ashtray’s full, time to buy a new car.” For me it’s literally going to be “Oh the toner ran out, time to get a new printer.” I mean, at this point it really makes sense. It’s five years old, in bad cosmetic shape, prints crookedly, other minor quirks–I might as well get a new printer when the toner runs out. If the toner runs out.

But I digress. That was the first reason I was worried about not being able to print in the lab–bad printer, waste of resources. Everyone else prints in the lab–and it’s maintained and equipped for this very purpose–so why should I miss out? The second reason I was worried was that I wrote the paper in the Office suite that I use but few others do. I stopped using Microsoft Office and the associated applications (Word, Excel, Powerpoint, etc.) about a year ago and switched to OpenOffice, which is an open source office suite. It comes with everything MS Office does–word processor, spreadsheet, database, etc.–but it’s entirely free and maintained by programmers around the world. It’s very professional, and although it saves in its own format, it can read and write Microsoft Word documents, too, nearly flawlessly. However, I was concerned that by creating it in OpenOffice, tweaking the positions of the graphs, tables, etc, by saving it in Word format to print from a lab computer (since they definitely don’t use OpenOffice) I’d lose a lot of formatting. Anyhow, I’ve been very impressed by using OpenOffice in the time that I’ve used it, and I’m happy that instead of paying $300 for Office every time they release a new version, I can just download the latest version of OpenOffice and get the same functionality. If you’ve been thinking about buying Office, I’d say hold off and give OpenOffice a try. It has probably 80-85% of MS Office functionality at a much better price: free. Plus, as I said, it reads/writes to all MS Office formats, so you wouldn’t lose the ability to open and edit those old files you have. Dan’s actually one of the programmers who maintains OpenOffice–fixing bugs, adding features, tweaking performance, etc–and he’s the one who got me started on it. If you want to check it out, you can find all the information at http://www.openoffice.org.

So that’s all done, now. My ten page research paper for African Politics seems easy in comparison–of course, I haven’t started it yet, and it’s due on Tuesday, so that may change soon. I’m just glad that the big stuff is out of the way, and I can keep going with my work now. I feel like I’m so out of touch with the world and people here since I basically worked in my room every night last week for most if not all of each night. My room is a mess, too. I really have to vacuum this place or pretty soon things might start evolving from crud on my floor. Not good. I have dishes that have been sitting here for the last week, and my grill is still in the lounge from last week’s Sunday dinner. Oh, that reminds me–I made a spectacular dinner last Sunday night, though it was just me eating. I marinated four very thin pork chops in a sauce I bought last term called “Tiger Sauce.” It’s supposed to be pretty spicy, and indeed it was, but it had an excellent flavor, too. Then I made some black beans and rice on the side, and tossed some steamed broccoli in a mixture of garlic and various spices sauteed in olive oil. That was the best meal I had in a long time. I have to do my dishes so that I can cook up some hot dogs and baked beans for dinner tonight. Kind of a let down after last week’s feast, but hey, it’s still great stuff. A couple of weeks ago I was shopping for food, and I knew that I only had a tiny bit of ketchup left so I put the smallest bottle I could find in my cart, but then I had a great idea. I have two bottles of BBQ sauce that I bought a couple years ago that were unopened, so last time I made hot dogs, I used that instead of ketchup. Not bad, actually. The bottle I almost bought was Hunt’s ketchup, anyhow, and I don’t really like the flavor of that. I still prefer Heinz, but they only sell fairly big bottles. There’s no way I’m going to be able to finish the bottle of BBQ sauce I opened–and definitely not both of them–before I leave, but hey, I saved money and I’m working down the food I have.

So that’s about all I have to say for now. I should start writing (and researching) my paper that’s due on Tuesday today, and I think I’m going to get to work on that now. Have a good day. I know I am without that project anymore.

14 days until graduation.

You’ll have to speak up, I can’t hear you clearly.