Bits and pieces

Don't you love it when, a mere four days after you buy an ungodly expensive computer, the company releases an even better model with a bigger screen and a wireless mouse and keyboard standard AND prices it two hundred bucks less than what you just paid? Yeah, I love that, too. As I'm sure do the fine folks at the Apple store who received a phone call from me today. "Ummm, can you help me out here?" Thankfully, we're within the 2-week return policy, so my new iMac will be packed up, taken back, and exchanged for an even newer iMac that costs less. Go figure.

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We're in the first week of our last class now, which is called the Capstone class. Capstone apparently being Latin for "more work than human beings should have to do for one class." We are logging into an on-line business simulator with our teams (yep, another f***ing group project) and running a business, in competition against the other teams in our class. The simulation goes in rounds, and each round represents a year of business. We have to develop a line of products, determine future planning, schedule R&D, figure out marketing (price, promotion, sales projections, etc.), schedule production (based on forecasts and, at this point, some gut reaction), add capacity if needed, and then hammer out financing (we can do short-term debt, long-term debt, issue stocks and bonds, etc.). It's supposed to pull everything we've learned over the past two years together with a nice tidy bow.

What I'm quickly learning is that running an imaginary business takes almost as much time as running a real one. Yay. I'm also realizing that I apparently don't remember much of what I learned last year.

Oh yeah, and while we're doing that whole running-a-company thing, we have textbook readings, assignments, discussion board posts...it's death by academia.

This week we got ourselves signed up and logged in, completed a situation analysis (which took me 2+ hours tonight alone), a rehearsal round (that was all of last night: 4+ hours), review of the 36-page student guide for the program, used a cattle-prod to get the other people in our groups off their butts and actually working (I've been marginally more successful at this in my group than M, whose group quickly appointed him Captain and then went AWOL), and are working on our first practice round.

None of this counts towards our grade, mind you. It's all just the basic stuff to get us going.

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Tomorrow I'm going with Zozer on a school field trip. We're going to a pumpkin patch. She's very excited, so I'm hoping that the predicted storms hold off or miss us entirely. The storms are predicted at a 90% liklihood, though, so we have Plan B, which is taking her Saturday to the annual BBQ hosted by M's company at a different pumpkin patch. Either way, and hopefully both ways, we're getting the girl a pumpkin. Now if we can just find time to carve it.

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Sometime in college (undergrad...waaaaay back in the day) I began experiencing insomnia. I'd lay awake for hours, and then fall asleep only to wake up here and there in fits and starts. It's miserable. I've struggled with that on and off ever since, using over the counter sleep aids to get me back on track. These days, though, I have absolutely no problems falling asleep, or staying that way. M claims I'm snoring like a sailor, and I don't doubt it. I guess maybe before I simply wasn't exhausted enough.

Speaking of...good night!