it finally happened. i had a dream about barack obama. in my dream barack and i were hanging out. we played a game of basketball before he took me on a tour of the slums of chicago. later i stayed over at his house, a small apartment in a large condominium building. i watched as he took time to play with his children, a boy and a girl (in real life, obama has two daughters). after i started heading home, i suddenly realized i left my camera at their place.

i woke up earlier than usual and managed to go out for a run. wasn't able to go non-stop this time, started cramping up on my left side and had to walk it off. must remember to download some new songs into my mp3 player. the ones that i have have lost most of their inspirational qualities and i spend most of my run skipping songs.

a crazy day of computers. first, my father's dell laptop finally arrived, shipped to the cafe; i knew this because i was diligently tracking the package online. then my craig's list contact got in touch with me, said he was in the neighborhood and didn't mind delivering the used pc i was buying from him. i spent some time setting up the new machine. i discovered it was an AMD athlon as well, which meant i could replace the slower (600mhz) slot A CPU cartridge with my slightly faster AMD athlon (800mhz). my father dropped by briefly with the laptop and we set it up. i'd never used windows vista before, it's true what they say, it has some similarities to OS X (things like the gadgets, which are OS X widgets).

rest of the day i worked on a rush job project for SRM, due thursday.

later in the evening i made an emergency computer house call back at my parents' place, when my father couldn't figure out how to connect to their wifi network. fortunately it wasn't that cold (in the 50's) and i managed to make it there and back without freezing.

books that i've read (and reading) within the past 2 months:

a lot of asian history, i know. i actually didn't read shadow of the silk road or perfect spy. shadow seemed more like a pretentious travelogue than a factual history book. perfect spy i just didn't have time to read. out of all these books, the early chinese empires was the best but it's dense. i'm currently working on god machine, the story of helicopters.