The walk out of Exam Schools, when you realise you’re on the finishing stretch and your friends are waiting for you outside, really feels like you’re in a movie. Unfortunately it got less smooth after that point as I didn’t realise that three seperate groups of friends were there to meet me and some only met up with me when I’d got all the way back to college… Great atmosphere nonetheless.
I expected to be overjoyed and ecstatic at finishing, and looking forward to celebrating. Instead my dominant feeling is “thanks goodness I can now get on with my life”. I’ve spent the past two months, and in particular the past three weeks, putting everything aside in favour of preparing for weird three hour sessions of writing, and now I want to get on with the host of other things that I’m interested in.
There will be celebrations—fourth years all going out tomorrow night. But mostly just looking forward to heading into college and reading in the sun.
I was linked to The Arrival Store today, a site which will ship you loads of western-style stuff on arrival in Korea (probably to teach English, as I will be doing). Though there is the usual butter, cheese etc. which are hard/impossible to get over there, there is also a list of “must haves” which, apparently, expats often really really want on arriving. The items on this list are things like bedding, mattress-pads, large bath towels, a water purifier, a cleaning kit. They also do smartphones, to try and ensure one’s Internet access is sorted out before getting the landline connected.
Getting hold of a water purifier probably makes environmental sense since you can’t drink the tap water in most areas of Korea (not sure about my area; should find out!), and hardcore cleaning supplies are something you’re probably going to need thanks to inconsiderate former teachers who don’t have many obligations regarding the place they leave you. However, I think that the purifier could wait, and hardcore cleaning supplies could be packed or you could note down the Korean words for standard stuff and go get it. You’re going to have to go shopping soon after arrival whatever. For bedding I was thinking of taking a sleeping bag, which would be useful for travelling anyway. If things are so totally terrible, there’s always a 찜질방.
It’d only be worth getting the cleaning stuff, then, if you were ordering loads of other stuff from this company. And it seems to me that to do so would to be defeat the whole purpose of trying to integrate (somewhat) into a completely different culture. Sure Korean mattresses are harder. Sure the bedding looks quite different. But unless you have some medical reason why you’ll be made miserable by this (almost certainly not true for the average person going to Korea to teach), I’m sure that everyone will get used to it if they give it a chance. Personally, I think Asian bedding is really cool in how much more compact it is.
Regarding mobiles—live disconnected for a bit while you figure things out. Always good to take an opportunity to do that.
A disjunction of all conjunctions of most of them.
It’s been a difficult week and a half since finishing exams, since the week has been one long drawn-out goodbye to everything here. BREAK Staying up late means getting up late means reluctance to get started on my summer projects and summer reading until getting home tomorrow. So each day I feel sad about leaving, wait out the day until it’s time to spend time with friends in the evening, and then the next day feel sad again, without any closure since I don’t know whether or not that’ll be the last time I see the people I have just seen either for a while or forever.
The two proper social events for leaving, which I had at the end of last week, were good. On Friday night we had schools dinner with all the third and fourth year mathematicians and joint schools and various tutors. Since most of the time we spend with tutors are in academic situations, in which we are decidedly not their equals, it was really great that on Friday I did feel equal to them; though of course our relationship with our tutors is not friendship in the usual sense, having been in the Balliol community together for four years means that we do have a strong relationship.
On Saturday night we had the final bop of term. The theme was The Nineties and I played a set mixing mostly nineties dance with a little K-pop and some Rihanna, which proved to be very popular so it was nice to have that opportunity. Since so much of the room was younger than me—this term in particular the freshers look like children to my eyes—it wasn’t as significant for me as last year was but still an ending. We tried to go out afterwards but all the clubs were full so at around 1am around sixty Balliolites stood around on Cornmarket for half an hour or so; this was pretty strange.
I’m not so sad to be leaving behind the academic life I’ve lived here. I think that this is because I’ve had various different tutors and I’ve only had each one for a few months at a time, so I’ve never grown attached to one particular area of philosophy or style of learning (exception being Bob’s death last year). I know that the things I have learnt about here I can carry on developing my understanding of; there’s no sense in which anything intellectual is ending.
My social life here has been far more continuous. Huge numbers of people have drifted in and out of my life over the past four years, in most cases brought together by shared membership of Balliol. There’s the small number of people with whom I have very strong relationships, and I suppose not much will change with those people except we’ll see each other a lot less frequently. But then there are all the people who I know, and might sit and talk to for three quarters of an hour in the JCR, who I either won’t see ever again or who I will see very rarely and will never be quite as comfortable with. And there are legions and legions of these people: undergrads spanning maybe six or seven years, and some post-grads too. I think that’s the biggest thing I’m leaving behind: the Balliol community, and some small part of the wider Oxford University community. And all the things that we did together, usually organised communally, officially or unofficially through the JCR and College.
xkcd is rarely of any interest to me nowadays; this one though was very interesting to learn from.
How-to: Erase Old Hard Disks | engadget
Replacing both my HDDs this week. I don’t think it’s worth the time to
erase my encrypted partitions but I wanted to erase my unencrypted
Windows partitions, and it’s great to know that shred can target
individual partitions.
Disable libraries Remove favourites from explorer Remove libraries from explorer Disable “homegroup”
from “Tweaking with Vishal”.
I’ve started using macchanger to rotate my MAC
addresses
for privacy. However, it seems it’s not actually very
random. Better than before.
Haskell in Emacs | Sam Ritchie
Keys bound:
C-c dshow error on current line as picked up by lintingC-c C-lload file into REPLC-c C-zjump to REPLC-c lrun through hs-lint for suggestionsC-c C-dlook up documentation of a function
However this is much better: ghc-mod which can be installed from the Debian repositories.
The #newinwheezy game: Grml packages in Debian/wheezy | mikas blog
The Grml distro is a handy text-only live CD for system maintenance. Now it’s easy to use it from within Debian, such as for example having an ISO in /boot that GRUB can boot up when you tell it to.
