Yesterday, Cola got on the train to Spain in the rain. It's been cold and wet here. She will be nice and warm in Spain. Yuri shows up tomorrow and my school starts Tuesday, so I should be able to hold overwhelming loneliness at bay. Also, I should clean the damn house. Today there was a trans march, but I didn't see the article about it in Liberation until two hours after it started. ActUp lists a starting location but not a destination or anything. Oh well. Protesting during only my third weekend here would have been something. Maybe I should join a student movement or something.
(skip to the more interesting part)
My day so far: Woke up late. Read news. Made coffee (Cola has made coffee every morning so far *sniff*. And we're nearly out of coffee filters!), 25% of chores. Looked at Berkeley's extensive documentation requirement for application. Wondered where else I should apply to. Wondered how on earth to get Anthony Braxton to fill out UC Berkeley's required forms since I can't call him and email is sometimes hit or miss. Placed a phone call over the internet (yay skype. username: celesteh1 . I'm also on AIM and Gtalk, but I can't do VOIP on Gtalk with everyone, only some people). Got a regular phone call from my ISP. As soon as people hear me say «Bonjour» on the phone, they say, "oh, you don't speak French, do you?" Well, a little. Anyway, they're calling me back in English on tuesday, which is good, because I don't know if I signed up for the thing where I can make unlimited local calls on a DSL phone for not.
The DSL hardware I'm renting, by the way, it extremely annoying. The metal contacts on the DSL filters don't actually touch any of the metal contacts in my phone jacks. I've been forced to jam a bunch of used metro tickets under one side of the adaptor and tape the whole thing in place with gaffing tape (a relative of duct tape). My piece of hardware has a warm pulsing glow of the France Telecom logo, which should make Yuri feel warm and cozy at night. When I unplug it at night for her, it will forget all of the settings, because the "save to flash memory" button on the gateway webpage is apparently some sort of prank. Switching to the english version of said web page crashes Safari. I can't get it to change any of the settings at all, except somewhat randomly. I've failed to change the password, the name of the network, or the wireless channel it runs on. It does, however, change settings by itself in exciting and interesting ways. TV over DSL (huh?) is turned on. Now it's turned off? I haven't tried changing settings over an ethernet cable yet, as I don't have one. I suspect that in order to change settings, I need to connect to it via USB, which entails installing a bunch of device drivers written by the same people who can't make telephone connectors and whose web interface claims to work while not working at all. I'll probably do it eventually. I wish I had an external hard drive to boot from or something. I like how stable my laptop is and I sense I may sacrifice that. Alas!
I'm drinking loads of coffee and I slept in late, so I will have energy for Nuit Blanche. There's a bunch of art installations going up tonight from 7PM to 7AM and a bunch of bars and restaurants are staying open for it. I will take as many pictures as I can, which may not be very many on account of the darkness and a reluctance to use my flash since it annoys people. Now I must go make dinner in advance of going out. Wish I knew somebody to go with.
And, tomorrow is the free day at the Louvre.
No comments:
Post a Comment