I got some good news last week, and found out that I'd be able to take the placement test at some point after registering for the course, provided I pass before the course begins. Sadly, I immediately became irresponsible and spent the week in celebration (aka: not working).
That's bad, and needs to stop. I'll make a conscious effort to get back to studying for my test now, so I don't find myself in a similar "one month all or nothing" situation. If that happened, it would be really inexcusable.
If I can get myself in line though, I've got a bit over two months remaining to do what I thought had to be done in a bit under one. So things are working out to that extent.
The bad news is that my old computer finally died. It had been struggling for some time with broken drives, and those other computer errors that creep up with time and are fairly inexplicable. The last straw came when I tried to upgrade my video drivers. That crashed the system, and caused all my icons to vanish. Instead of spending the 50-100 dollars to fix that (plus the 150 dollars for a new dvd drive, plus 100 dollars or so for extra memory), I just decided to pay up for a new pc.
So far the new pc seems nice enough: I'll have a better idea later. I got in on sale at Best Buy (seriously... who buys their pc's in stores anymore?) and think I got a fairly decent price. I did skimp on lots of stuff I /should/ have though. I don't have Microsoft Office, and I'm sure that will come back to haunt me in the near future. I don't have the extended warranty either...
And I've lost some files I'd rather not have. Let that be a good lesson in backing things up, to anyone reading this. I lost my resume, my honors thesis and other undergraduate work, a few pictures, and either part or all of my MP3 collection (depending on if I can transfer back the things that were on my iPod). Not particularly pleasant.
