is that, whilst doing so, you were jay­walk­ing and con­se­quently unable to beat the oncom­ing bus. I decide to have a week off between jobs and go slow on uni for a day to recover from a near-cold and end up with con­junc­tivi­tis and a course of anti-biotics. I gen­er­ally avoid sig­nif­i­cant ill­ness so its nice to get this out of the way now, before sum­mer starts properly!

So this is week #2 off work, with a fair amount of uni also not-attended so far this week (I man­aged an impres­sive three hours yes­ter­day after­noon, and a lec­ture for the gram­mar eng­lish course on Tues­day evening, and man­aged to delib­er­ately avoid, sleep through, or decide against attend­ing the rest). I’ve a decent atten­dance record in most courses so far this semes­ter so I didn’t bother with certs for the first half of the week… but then I had to go see a doc this morn­ing about the eye and I’m sup­pos­edly on these meds for a week now. So, assum­ing they work in appro­pri­ate time, I’d still be rock­ing up to uni with a noto­ri­ously con­ta­gious thingy for the first half of next week… which means I might even end up miss­ing more class. Which is ridicu­lous. Any­way I’ve got a lull in assess­ment at least… I was try­ing to write a pres ear­lier this week between phlegm-filled breaths, and ended up giv­ing it unable to really speak… it’s about Renais­sance thought in early mod­ern Europe; unfor­tu­nately there was no oppor­tu­nity to work in any plague allusions ;-)

Speak­ing of early mod­ern Europe, there was the annual book­fest at Uni­ver­sity of Syd­ney from Sat­ur­day through to yes­ter­day (Wednes­day) which was so awe­some. I say speak­ing of early mod­ern Europe because I now have a col­lec­tion on the sub­ject (sans jour­nal arti­cles, etc., but there’s always Gale/ProQuest et al.) on par with that of Fisher library. The uni gets rid of low-circulation books, and also sells dona­tions from the box you’ve prob­a­bly walked past a thou­sand times and not really thought much about (if you’re a USyd stu­dent who at least pre­tends to study) on the way into Fisher on the left. Every­thing is dirt cheap… I went with Selo and we both by pure chance spent exactly $33, which net­ted us two A4 ream box sized piles of books. The first few days are prices as marked, but Tues­day it’s $10/A4 box, and on Wednes­day it’s down to $5! I really wanted to go and have a look at what was left but wasn’t quite up to it. Every­thing is put out on Sat­ur­day so the col­lec­tion would have seri­ously dimin­ished by Wednes­day, but given the sheer scope of it (it’s in the Great Hall of the Quad, and imag­ine if you will the entire floor space in there cov­ered about three lay­ers deep in books and you have an approx­i­mate start­ing num­ber) chances are there’d still be some gems for the uncovering!

Yeah… so $33 would nor­mally buy me five books, less if they’re aca­d­e­mic reference/not classics/M&B (kid­ding). Did seri­ously well.

In other news, I’ve spent my recov­ery time bat­tling with Wine to lit­tle avail. I tried installing it a few times (insert alco­hol related jokes here) and got increas­ingly no-where, or sort of did, but then ended up hit­ting a brick wall (passed out in a pool of my own vomit, so to speak). So I installed Steam and spent $9.95 (USD! Tim was wrong, or at least Selo quot­ing Tim was wrong… either way, my receipt says USD) on Counter-Strike (to which I have moral objec­tions, because the idea of spend­ing money — even $US10 — on a free mod is pre­pos­ter­ous) for the MCE com­puter which kicks butt (well, kicks butt once I fig­ured out how to check the blind­ingly obvi­ous “Widescreen” box).

Then I bought HL GotY pack on eBay that comes with four CDs or some­thing and will hope­fully install on Linux fan­ta­si­cally with­out Steam. Or, sort of with Steam but in a less-dependent-upon-it kind of way that makes every­thing run slightly hap­pier. Good frag­ging times ahead, hope­fully. Worst case I buy a decent wire­less key­board + mouse (yeah, one of those five-button things, I’m sold!) and use the MCE box instead… it’ll just mean higher fram­er­ates at the expense of hav­ing to walk down­stairs, and prob­a­bly a bet­ter gam­ing expe­ri­ence (can you say 5.1 and 32″ screen?) any­way. But it’s on Win­dows, and… insert ide­al­is­tic rant here. Sigh!