Well, yesterday I did some emails and computer update stuff, that took a little while. Lots of updates that apparently needed to reboot my computer. I hate it when I get lots of ones like that. You’d think by now they’ have worked out how to do all that kind of thing without having to update the computer. Anyway, Anastasia’s new laptop arrived and I spent a good chunk of time setting it up. This was my first opportunity to have a good play with Vista and so far it’s something of a mixed bag of impressions. It looks a fair bit nicer than XP, I’d say they’ve done a good job with the Windows Presentation Foundation. The whole security thing is fairly annoying, though… seems like every time you install something, or even just to run certain things, it asks you for security permission… even if you’re logged in as administrator, it asks for administrator permission. Very weird. Also it has this thing where it doesn’t run some programs on start-up unless they’re in the list approved by Microsoft (which is growing every day as people submit programs to it, to be fair), so things like BOINC and some update programs you need to explicitly tell your computer to run every time you start up, rather than just having them run automatically. Anyway, Anastasia’s laptop is also a tablet, which has its own set of interesting functionality. It also has a fingerprint reader, although that has some issues of its own in terms of making sure it reads correctly, and not hogging resources during normal operations for some reason. Probably just needs an update, not sure yet.

I also had a conference call with the people I was doing some work for in Christchurch. Since I’ve become remote they’ve been less communicative about what they want me to do. I suspect that it’ll just kinda stop happening at this rate, which is a shame. It probably means I won’t get any money for the time I’ve spent on it so far, which has been fairly considerable. I forgot to ask them about that when I was conference calling with them. Perhaps when I head back to New Zealand I can do some work for them in person (assuming I’m there for long enough for it to be worth it).

Anyway, today I met up with Laura and Paris. Now, Laura is in charge of the local property company in Gainesville that I was going to be working for. After seeing my resume, she thought I’d be a good candidate for the business manager position, if you’ll recall. While that opportunity didn’t pan out, Laura also asked me if I could meet up with her and her daughter to talk a bit about my experience with Japanese culture clubs, since I have the various officer positions I’ve held listed on my resume. Bit of a quirk of fate, to be sure. In any case, I readily agreed to impart some of my experience to Paris, who’s trying to get some more activities and such going at her high school. We talked for quite a while, I gave her a bunch of ideas that I’d seen before, then sent her some links later about anime and some other stuff which I thought would be helpful. It all seemed to be fairly well received and I’m looking forward to hearing from Paris about how things go with her club at her school. ^^