Wanna wanna wanna

So, the Faculty Honours study room leaves something to be desired.

It'll be great if I need to use fancy software that I don't have on my Mac. There are loads of computers with special stuff installed on them. It'll also be great for group work, because there are three breakout rooms that are just for Honours students, so we won't have to compete with the millions of undergrads who descend on the library study rooms in the second half of every trimester. We'll have to compete with each other of course, but hopefully with only 50 or so using the room we'll be able to coordinate. And the breakout rooms have whiteboards.

What the room will not be great for is using my Mac. The only power sockets are the ones which the Faculty desktops are attached to. Some of these are available, but they're under the desks which have the Faculty desktops on. The only way to attach neoMac to them is to shift the desktops aside and clear a tiny space wide enough for me and my Mac. I suspect that people using the desktops won't appreciate this when the year gets busy. The other option is to put neoMac on one of the tables in the middle of the room and run the power cable over to the wall sockets. It'll reach, but it will almost be taut. This will probably raise health and safety issues for other users of the room.

The room has a microwave, but no hot water. To get hot water we'll have to walk around the corner to the general-use lounge, where there is also a microwave. So what's the point of having another microwave in here?

Finally, service people are currently using the room as a hallway between the back stairs and the main part of the building. This is mildly disruptive, but my real concern is that they're leaving the front door (which is card-access only) propped open so they can come and go. I like the idea of having a locked room. It means the random homeless guy who sometimes tries to get himself locked into the building at night can't come here and bother me. (NO, I don't have a smoke. Or a light. If I had a smoke, I might have a light, but as I don't, please go away.) If builders and electricians are going to leave the door open all the time, it kind of defeats the purpose.

The math review is over in a flurry of Lagrangean multipliers. Today there were only 11 of us (there were 21 on Wednesday). I've managed to speak to about half of the people who were there at the start. Strangely enough, although just about everyone is doing Macro, no one has yet confessed to doing econometrics. So just how many people will be in that first lecture on Tuesday? Or are the econometricians so smart they all decided not to go to the math review?