After a lot of thinking and talking about the semester in New Zealand some of my friends have been planning, I finally did some work of my own on Friday to start making it a reality. I arranged a meeting with my academic adviser to talk about the process of getting classes approved for transfer credit. As I should have expected, it went very well. My adviser is always smiling, informative, and fun to talk to. From the very beginning he expressed a lot of enthusiasm for the project, and loved the idea of going as a group. He told me what I should be doing, what classes would likely transfer, and that, as the department chair, he would get to make the final decision for approving my classes. I walked out feeling elated and ready to make my first trip ever outside of the United States.
20 minutes later I was meeting with my independent study adviser and feeling completely different. I was already a little nervous having not been able to read everything I was supposed to for this week. But, to my surprise and disappointment, the reading wasn't even mentioned. He was more concerned whether I had been able to log into my new Linux account. I hadn't. Had I looked at the code? No, I had been waiting until I could use it on the account. In the middle of talking to me, not five minutes into our meeting, he stopped. “Go get that taken care of. Now.”
The abruptness and tone of the command startled me, and as I set off on the task I got the feeling he was extremely unhappy that I had not resolved the issue. But my account hadn't even been created until Tuesday, I didn't get the password until Wednesday, and I let him know Thursday that I couldn't get in. I wasn't that far behind, was I? I ended up at the office of one of the older CTS managers. The “Live free or die – UNIX” license plate mounted above his door struck me as the most lively artifact anywhere in sight. Sitting alone at his terminal (whose dual monitors were producing the only light in the room), making little attempt at conversation with me or the person who had brought me here, he matched the stereotypical computer programmer to a frightening degree.
Fortunately he was able to fix the problem quickly and I was soon on my way back to my independent study adviser's room, trying to shake off the creepy feeling I had gotten so far. Back in his room, which was also as dark as could be managed, I found him watching some sort of professional development video the School was required him to watch. By now I am used to waiting for our meetings to start, so I pulled out some of that reading I hadn't finished and waited. The video ended, but on the first question out of his mouth I had already failed again: “Did you get everything compiled and running?” Well, no... I thought you just wanted me to fix the login problem...
This time the command was also the end of the meeting. No theory discussion, no questions of how my week was. This felt very different and very uncomfortable. I went to the nearest computer lab and opened a command line for my new account. Well... I tried to. I guess I've never done this on Linux before... I opened up the account in an explorer window. God, there were so many directories. Which one was mine? Do I want the home folder? Research? Projects? How about Bioalign? That's the name of the cluster... oh, there's a “Cluster” folder too... Oh! jgs2! That's me! Oh... here's another one... and... another one? No, that was the last one
I chose one, which turned out to be wrong, and saved the files I had been given. At this point I was pretty flustered, couldn't remember what I was supposed to be doing after realizing that there weren't really instructions provided, and didn't know how to deal with what I had, which mostly seemed to be long lines of terminal commands that I either couldn't get to work or didn't know what they did. The closest thing I did have to instructions was in a format I had never seen, couldn't find online, and didn't have the slightest hope of using.
I was overwhelmed. I stayed there in the lab, moving files around and trying to make sense of what I was supposed to do, until after 5:00, when I knew my adviser would be gone for the day and my suite would be getting ready to cook Ian's birthday dinner. Back at the dorm, I recounted what had happened that afternoon and suddenly felt on the verge of tears. Thankfully everyone was very sympathetic and I was able to enjoy myself making some delicious pasta and meat sauce.
The night turned out very well. Not only did we get to enjoy good food we made ourselves, but it was also the Zach-approved official beginning of spring. We brought in the new season with a nighttime game of frisbee 500 and a session of stargazing which, while not at all as bright as I had over break, was still beautiful and very relaxing. This morning I christened Spring for myself with a run to Forrest Park and reading on Art Hill. I felt a lot better than I had yesterday afternoon. Having distance from it helped me put it in perspective, but perhaps more important was the fact that I was able to get some sleep.
And so, speaking of that...
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