Hmmm.  Germany is pretty well documented, but that was only two-and-a-half weeks of the summer.  What have I been doing for the other 11.5 weeks?  And what are my plans for the last week-and-a-half of vacation?

Back in May, I spent a week at home in Pennsylvania.  Honestly, it seems like a lifetime away now.  I remember being there.  I remember meeting each of my two best friends’ new babies.  I remember hanging out with my brother.  I remember my sister’s college graduation.  But it’s all hazy now.  I have to really try if I want to recall any details.

When I got back to Texas after that, my life was a flurry of preparation.  I moved to a new apartment during the first week in June.  Then in the second week of June I left for Germany.

Three days after I got back from Germany, I adopted a six-week-old kitten.  I named him Blitz LeBeau (in honor of legendary and current Steelers defensive coordinator Dick LeBeau).  He is so great.  He does some things that seriously annoy and/or infuriate me.  But he’s also so damn cute and so loving.

The following week the second summer session of school began and I worked at a local community college teaching a stats class and also worked at my own university as a tutor and grader.  It was an intense five week session.  I never felt like I was caught up.  I always was behind on lecture notes or grading or something.  It was really hard to come back from travelling and dive right into something as time consuming as a 5 week session of classes.  But somehow I survived and made it work.  And my students didn’t like me too much, but their grades were great.  Possibly the best grade distribution I’ve ever had teaching.  So, I don’t feel like my less-than-perfect preparation did them too much of a disservice.

Classes finished at the end of last week.  Since then, I couldn’t really tell you what I’ve been doing with my time.  It’s a blur of nothing.  I’ve been doing a LOT of sleeping, and a LOT of watching crap on Netflix (I’m not even working through the list of movies I want to see that I intended to work through during this break; I’m just watching nonsense TV shows).  I’m really low on cash, so I’ve been kind of a recluse.  I haven’t been going out with friends for meals or drinks much.  It’s been a little lonely, but it’s also been therapeutic.

The one thing I have been accomplishing during my time off is working through my mental list of tech-related projects I keep “meaning to get around to” but never do.  Until now!  I uninstalled iTunes and got DRM-free versions of all my music files (most of them were already DRM-free, but there were some I had to reacquire through other means).  I did a VERY small amount of research in non-iTunes free media players out there and settled on Winamp.  I specifically remember using Winamp in junior high school, before iTunes existed, and finding it cumbersome and annoying.  I was disappointed when I downloaded it and it looked EXACTLY the same as I remembered it from 10 years ago.  But, I gave it a shot, and I’m actually warming up to it.  It has a lot more customization options than iTunes without all the superfluous frills.  It’s really easy to navigate the media library (obviously easier than recent versions of iTunes, but that’s not setting the bar very high), and it’s also easy to change your default view of the media library if there’s a certain way you like to see it (also difficult/impossible in iTunes, which never seemed to save my settings and forced its shitty “innovative” ways of looking at music on me).  There is one navigation thing that really annoys me, but looking through the settings and customization options, I saw that I could change this if I really wanted to, so I’m less angry about it now because now I’m choosing to be lazy and not fix it.  Plus, the ONLY concern I had about leaving iTunes – that my iPod would now be a useless paperweight and/or I’d be stuck with what’s currently stored on it and could never add music or playlists without iTunes – is invalid.  Winamp supports iPod syncing, and it does it better than iTunes does.

Back in November when I got my Android tablet I synced my collection with Google Play.  So, I also have all of my music available easily on my phone and tablet.  Google Play, like Winamp, has proven itself surprisingly useful and way better than iTunes.  I never got on board with the “Genius mixes” in iTunes.  I tried it a few times but never found it to be useful or well-executed.  I saw the “Instant mix” feature in Google Play and rolled my eyes.  But I gave it a shot and it actually works.  When I’m in the mood for a certain “type” of music but don’t feel like putting in the time to go through my library and artfully craft a themed playlist, I can select a song or album and start up the “Instant mix” and it accurately shuffles up similar music.  I also find their store really easy to navigate and it doesn’t crash my computer every time I try to use it.  This is only a slight exaggeration.  Ever since the last iTunes software update, if I opened the iTunes store on my laptop, my computer would completely freeze for 3-10 minutes.  I always forgot about this, until I clicked on the “iTunes store” button and then immediately regretted my decision and wished I’d just gone to purchase the music from the Google Play store.  This was my primary motivation for ditching iTunes, actually.  I wanted to remove the temptation to just use iTunes when I wanted to download new music.  Mission accomplished!  I don’t think I’ll ever go back to iTunes now.

And all of this exploration and discovery and experimentation in the last week or two just completely cements me in the pro-Google/Android camp and the anti-Apple/iNation camp.  I always found the price and lack of customization for Apple’s products to be not-my-style, ever since the first iPhone launched.  Everything I read about their mobile products turned me off, and every interaction I had with an iProduct was not fulfilling for me.  Within 5 minutes, I knew I loved my Nexus 7.  Within 5 minutes, I knew I loved my Android phone (I upgraded to an LG Optimus G at the beginning of the summer and left Blackberry behind for good).  I’m firmly on the side of Google and Android in the mobile war that is currently raging.  I’m glad to have shed my final tie to the other side: iTunes.  (I guess technically I still have an iPod.  But to be fair, I’m not using their software to maintain it anymore, and I didn’t pay for it myself.)

Smaller adventures in tech recently include:
(1) ordering a Chromecast [it’ll still be weeks before the order is fulfilled, but I really want it!]
(2) finally backing up all my files. I meant to do this before Germany but never got around to it.  I don’t have automatic backups set up; I do it manually to my external hard drive.  I now feel more secure knowing my backup is current.
(3) cleaning up all my remote-file-storage-apps.  I put things in folders that needed to be in folders, deleted things I didn’t need anymore, removed redundancies through consolidation, and generally streamlined my remote file storage, which had turned into quite a mess with all my travelling this past year.
(4) researching and picking out a 10-inch tablet to buy when I have the money.  I settled on a mid-level Asus model.  I knew I wasn’t going to spring for the high-end Sony, HP, or Samsung models that are comparable in price to the iPad.  But I also didn’t want a $100 piece of shit that has no computing power and a barely-hi-res screen.  So, I arrived at this one.  I waffled a little bit and tried to find something better, but the only other things that appealed to me were way out of my price range.  Even the Nexus 10, which has gotten spotty reviews compared to the glowing ones for the Nexus 7, is $130 more expensive.  The reviews are pretty good on the one I chose, so I think it’ll be fine.
(5) preparing to go laptop-less this school year.  Of course, I’ll still use my laptop a lot.  But it is massive and heavy and annoying to transport.  When I bought my Nexus 7 tablet, I had hoped I could use it for all my mobile computing and stop carrying my laptop back and forth to and from school/work.  And I can.  Especially since I got a fancy Bluetooth keyboard I wanted for my birthday this year.  So, project #3 above is part of preparing to go completely mobile for teaching and school this year.  And #4 will help too.  🙂  The 7-inch tablet is certainly sufficient, but I think the 10-inch will be even better.

Okay, enough geeking out for now.  I wanna talk about my new apartment for a second.  It’s awesome.  The kitchen is still small, but larger than the one in my old place.  The water pressure and temperature in the shower is amazing, something that was lacking in my old place.  It’s in a really convenient location.  I have a really nice back patio/yard.  I’ve already had one cookout here and it went really well.  I think it’ll be really nice to sit outside and just hang out when it’s not quite so hot here.  I had unpacked almost everything before I left for Germany.  In the past week or so, I finally finished unpacking all my boxes.  All that was left was two “miscellaneous” boxes, and all of my books.  But now I’m completely settled.  I even hung up pictures and clocks today.  I still want to hang my posters, but I’ll save that for another day (or later today).  It feels way homier than my last two apartments.

And finally, the last issue that deserves some more thorough coverage: KITTEN.  I think this can mostly be covered in pictures & captions.

Anyway, there’s a week and a half left of summer vacation.  It’s sprinkled with a few pre-semester teaching meetings, but for the most part, I have “nothing to do.”  (Where “nothing to do” = finish my research paper that I was supposed to finish in the week between Germany and teaching this summer + prepare for teaching calculus in the fall + whatever recreational stuff I can fit in, and those are in order of importance)  I’m excited for the semester to begin, actually.  I had such an amazing summer.  I hope that I can carry this momentum far into the fall semester.  I always hope that, and it almost never happens.  But hopefully since this summer ended on a low-stress note (rather than ending with a PhD qualifying exam like the last two summers) I’ll be more relaxed and prepared heading into the fall and will be able to make it to midterms without too much trouble.  This will be my last year taking organized classes, so it’s the end of an era.  Next year will be all research/dissertation-writing (and teaching).  It’s an exciting time!