What I did today... er... yesterday

Finally lined up my third letter of recommendation. Christi's boss is going to write one. He's the director of Other Minds, which I did some volunteer work for. Actually, kind of a lot of volunteer work, some of it skilled w/ pro-tools and stuff. It's so awesome that he's going to write a letter.

Wesleyan wants a writing sample. I have exactly one paper left from school. It's the tuba paper on my website. The spelling is being fixed. God knows why I handed in a paper without running a spell check on it. As I recall, finding research materials on the history of the tuba turned out to be somewhat challenging (go figure) and I think I turned in the paper late. This is an ill-omened paper all the way around. The graphics and the bibliography all got lost in the giant system crash of 1997. (Teeth were gnashed. Wails arose from the valley. The one server at Mills that handled everything had a head crash and all was lost and the campus was offline for a month or maybe just a week, anyway, I was lucky even part of my paper survived. All the rest of my papers were lost when the disk on my old server gave up the ghost. I think that if I reassembled the computer with the old motherboard, the old disk controller and the old disks, they would probably work again, if I could re-discover all those hardware settings from the time before auto-detect. But that's a lot of work for what might be a low payoff. Academic writing was never my strongest point. I used to joke that's why I took music and computer science, because of the dearth of required papers.) Well, it wasn't entirely ill-omened. I got email from the principal tubist of the Vienna Philharmonic asking about the biliography because he was interested in my paper. I'm going to be able to email him back with some answers, because today I went to the Mills library to try to re-construct my bibliography. I was not 100% successful in this quest, but I did manage to identify who all the authors are (probably) and direct readers to their web pages or books by them that are at least on the same subject. Christi is telling me not to worry about this too much and maybe I should just submit one of my many political manifestos.

And, while at Mills, I got my transcript requests. I still need to worry about transcripts from the Junior College I went to a long long time ago. I was still in highschool at the time. My theory is that it shouldn't count, even if I did transfer in credits towards my degree. Sheesh, I transfered in AP Test credits too. I hope I don't need to go scare those up.

Mills is on break, but I still ran into several people, including a CS professor, Susan Wang. We chatted a bit. And I ran into Maggi Payne, my composition teacher who is writing a letter for me. We talked about people she knew at all the schools I'm looking at. Everyone went to Mills. I need to talk a lot more about CCM in my statements. And then, in the library, I ran into Sharon. It's nice seeing familiar faces.

And then I had to run someplace else to drop off forms and then I had to get Christi and take her someplace. And then we went to Gaylords for coffee and ran into Luoi, Fausto and Timananana. Yay! More happy people! I usually don't see so many people in a week.

And now I am somewhat procrastinating on filling out my calarts application, since I'm not sure about listing my Community College stuff or not. I guess I have to. Something is amiss with my printer and the colors are not lining up 100%, so everything is slightly blurry. The application is in color. None of the text is actually black, it's some trendy shade of grey. I understand being as artistic as possible when designeing printed material for an arts college, but when you're publishing a PDF on the web for folks to use, it's important to consider technological limittations. Gray-scale is good. Black text is good. Design for the common-person and her cheap printer! Oh.... I should make Mitch print it.

Anyway, all of this is wayyyy too last minute. I haven't been this last-second since I was an undergrad. I'm too old for this now. I might put it off till next year, except now I've got all these other people involved. Anyway, I'm so busy, I hardly even have time to mourn! I think I want to go crawl into a hole and lie there quietly for several days.