Massive update! OS X! Egypt! School!

Phew, what a couple of weeks! Let's see if I can sum everything up. First off, this is the last week of scheduled classes. My Entrepreneurship class project group gave its final presentation on Tuesday, to what we think was general acclaim. It took a massive amount of effort on the part of my teammates, as I was in Seattle last weekend! Mel and I wandered northward to visit Ryan and Sara and see the new house. I'm pretty sure I've discovered a new shade of envy not previously present in my psyche. (It didn't help that Washington had one of its rare beautiful weekends while we were there - Sunny and warm enough to forego any kind of jacket.) At any rate, while I was enjoying a production of Miss Saigon, my teammates were cranking out world class prose and powerpoint. I tip my hat to them.

Running concurrently to my Entrepreneurship class was my Distributed Systems class, my project group for which is at least as talented and dedicated. See, we had this demo Tuesday (yes, the same day as the previously mentioned presentation). Did I mention I chose a terrible weekend to be out of town? Nevertheless, the demo went flawlessly - perhaps we were bolstered by the fact that we scored better than perfect on the most recent phase of that project. Feelin' pretty good right now.

In the meantime, I've completely disregarded all common sense and installed OS X 10.4 ("Tiger") on my laptop. That's right, I upgraded the OS on my primary, nay, my only machine while relying on it to complete my Masters project (among other things). I'm an idiot. Fortunately, I'm a lucky idiot - everything went smoothly, and I encountered not a single problem in the process. It helped that I had a bootable copy of my old system on an external hard drive should anything go awry. Tiger, thus far, has been great - all of my apps work save Emacs (which required a build from the latest cvs - no big whoop). It's a nice upgrade - Spotlight, Dashboard etc. all work as advertised. Perhaps most importantly, Finder has finally been fixed such that the desktop and finder windows update whether they have focus or not - no more clicking on a Finder window to see if a download's complete, for example.

Anyway, I have a take-home final and a project writeup left to do (as well as a bunch of work on my Masters project), but it's definitely starting to feel like the end of the road. What a long, strange trip it's been. Still, I'm glad I came.