I will let you down

The Macro exam was almost exactly the exam I had prepared for, with no questions on unexpected topics, but a time management fail led to me doing only about two-thirds of the paper. I kept thinking I'd shortly unstick the bit I was stuck on, and then suddenly there was no more time. Fail. I probably will not get that A-.

The flames went higher

The Honours room is full of noisy people, so I never go there any more except to visit my locker. At the moment, my locker contains the following:

• A roll of cloth tape
• Whiteboard markers
• An extension cable
• A laser pointer
• A double adapter for a power outlet
• A dirty cloth that has been used as a whiteboard eraser
• A fan heater (yes, I've used this in lectures)

If the SIS forced open my locker, what kind of sedition would they accuse me of?

Focus on the pain

This is precisely how I feel right now: the knowledge of all the things I have to do in the next month is sitting on top of the structure of my current thoughts, but it's too heavy, and it's causing the structure to buckle and explode out sideways so none of my thoughts are where I need them to be when I go looking for them. In this image, my thoughts resemble a house built from matchsticks, and my to-do list looks a lot like, you know, the Death Star.

Those people keep a-movin'

50% of my iTunes purchases are now DRM-free! The rest should follow by the end of March, according to the press release. If 80% of all iTunes songs are DRM-free now, and yet only 50% of my (admittedly very small) purchase set falls into that category, do I have extraordinarily unlucky taste in music? Or just not mainstream?

I have a Smart playlist called "DRM" which grabs all songs in "Purchased" with a bitrate of 128 kbps. Before my upgrade yesterday, the DRM playlist looked like this:

Then I upgraded these:

Then the DRM playlist looked like this:

So the DRM-free version of Follow Me still has a low bitrate? Huh.

Today I bought textbooks. I wasn't going to buy them before speaking to my lecturers, but they're on the shelf in Vic Books with course titles on, which is usually a pretty good indicator that they're needed for the course (Vic Books so seldom get this wrong, they must be talking to each individual lecturer when they make up their readings lists for each trimester). Two books cost me $288. And I already bought one other for around $120 (it was to be "summer" reading, but it didn't arrive until late January. Fortunately it also turns out to be a recommended text). Textbooks are expensive.

Vic Books know nothing of a Micro textbook, so I will speak to the lecturer on that one. Otherwise, my book shopping for the trimester should be complete. I've never had it done so early before.

The math course starts in one hour. In principle, all the Honours students in econ or finance should be there. Will there be many of us? Will they be nice? Will I know anyone? About the only certainty is that some parts of the course will be boring.

Old familiar sting

Isn't day six a bit early for my first work-induced migraine?

Eyes wide open all the time

Finding a title for this, the last blog post of my sociology career, was the most difficult thing I've ever done on the internet. You can see that I've copped out by just choosing a versatile line from a favourite song. Finding something that's sufficiently meaningful without being ludicrous is way beyond me.

So I got an A in SOSC 318, and it's all over forever.

In order to make this post look less pathetic in length, here is a list of all my SOSC grades right back to when I was a first year who hadn't heard of the Enlightenment. Note that there are exactly two courses at each level. This is the minimum required to get a SOSC major, meaning that SOSC is the only one of my majors for which I haven't done loads of extra stuff.

Code	Title	Trimester	Grade
SOSC 111	Sociology: Foundations and Concepts	1/2004	A-
SOSC 112	NZ: Sociological Perspectives	2/2004	A+
SOSC 205	Sociology of Religion	2/2005	B+
SOSC 214	Special Topic (Globalisation and its Discontents)	2/2005	A
SOSC 303	Sociology of Deviance	1/2006	A
SOSC 318	Social Movements and the State	1/2008	A

I suppose I should have called this The Last Post, shouldn't I?

The only thing that's real

Another 1100 words today, meaning I've got 300 words left (600 if I take the extra 10%, as I usually do). The political section is finished and the cultural section half done. I'm almost certainly going to omit the results section. Around the middle of the day I had some confusion about my structure, but it sorted itself out after I reordered a few paragraphs, and now I know almost exactly where I'm going and what I will find when I get there.

I discovered another short article in the book of readings, so I might even get another journal entry done tonight.

Today was the last lecture I will ever attend in a sociology course. It was pretty awesome - Sandra gave us biscuits and cheese, did a practice run for presenting her latest paper to a conference next month (original research just for us!) then let us argue for the last half hour. I'm not that happy about never doing SOSC ever again, but insofar as it had to end some way, that was a good way for it to end.