Brian's World

Returning

I’m back at RPI for the fall semester.  If all goes well I’ll be receiving a diploma at the conclusion of the spring semester.  Sometimes I think back on the past 3 years and find myself loosing track of time.  It seems like only yesterday I filmed my first Student Senate meeting with Andy Clark & Eric Pratt or was briefed by August on the use of LDAP as a datastore.  I’ve found that I don’t spend much time thinking about my accomplishments over the past 3 years, I seem to always a disproportional amount of time on the things that haven’t worked well or have room for improvement.  I seem to abstain from appreciating things that have worked well over the past 3 years like the current implementation of Concerto or the relationships I’ve been able to maintain over only to focus on the more troublesome issues like “Concerto 2” and my unknown future after RPI.  There are times when I think about the future like hrm, this could be the last time you’ll be able to do X or Y as a college student.  I know I’ve passed up my fair share of opportunities and experiences over the past few years which sometimes makes me feel unfulfilled.  Actually,  I don’t know if unfulfilled is the right word… but I’ve digressed.   I think back and say well, ya know you should do somethings to gain the experience and then you’ll sort out the results later.  For the longest time I always thought that the integration of our experiences help to shape who we are, but I’m re-realizing (because I think I had this hypothesis 4 years ago in High School), that its also the things we pass up, the lack of experiences, that define who we are.

This past week has been busy for me working on various RPI projects, all of which I can safely report are behind schedule.  I spent an unanticipated large amount of time on the Concerto Screensaver which people better use.  I don’t enjoy participating in unintelligible and nonsensical adventures, and that has been exactly what this C#/.NET 3.5 process is.  At least it works… for now.  Shuttle Tracking is on hold for the time being.  I ran an apt-get upgrade and SSH decided it wouldn’t come back online.  I dropped by the RPI TV orientation a few times but generally felt out of place so I departed.

I regularly forget that others do not correlate seniority and experience with respect and inclusion like I try to do.  I’m very much bound to CC someone superior to me in an organization when I’m doing anything just to keep them in the loop.  I’ve found that while I don’t always want to hear what they may have to say, its always good to seek their input.  They are the person who has been around longer and 90% of the time they haven’t simply been crowned into their higher rank.

In other news, my door is nearly back to pre-departure condition.  I’m missing one piece of RPI-issue furniture (a shelf that rests on my desk) so I’m having to reorganize things a little bit.  I hope to have the locations of everything resolved by the end of the first week of classes (next week).