it's been quite a while since the last time i wrote here - about
four or five months? since then i've gotten a new apartment, moved,
and started my phd program. tomorrow marks week three of classes
(four if you count orientation). it's been great. i really enjoy my
machine learning class, at least so far. everything else is good
enough. my program is pretty small - about 26 people in my class,
which is still i think the largest cohort for the program. i have a
little cubicle in an office with the other CMU first-years and it's
great in there. i love having a designated spot where i can just go
and work. i've been taking notes for class on a really stupid eeepc
running arch with no display environment. i was using screen but i
might switch to tmux. maybe i'll stick with screen though. the only
issue i have is that i have to use tmux on my mac cause i don't
want to go through the effort of getting the newer version of
screen that supports vertical splitting (which is really the only
kind i care about). so i've been using tmux for the first time over
the weekend and already unlearned the screen keybindings. anyway, i
like that laptop because it's so tiny and i love having a throwaway
device for X-less stuff. speaking of, i also spent some time this
weekend setting up neomutt and calcurse to sync with my school
gmail and google calendar (respectively). both of them were a huge
headache because the school google accounts don't allow
oauth/app-specific passwords, so i had to make the credentials
through a different google account and invite my school account to
'test' it in order to actually authorize. i was going to do the
same with slack, because a bunch of communication stuff happens
through there, but it really doesn't seem worth the effort right
now. today, i also set up newsboat with a bunch of rss feeds from
different journals, mostly structural biology and comp bio stuff.
we'll see if i ever end up checking it, but it was fun to get going
and testing it out. i eventually want to write a script to
automatically download pdfs or plaintext for the papers i save for
later, but that might be annoying with journal credentials and all
the cli stuff i saw for scientific papers was libgen-related (at
least in the 3 seconds i looked). tomorrow i only have one class,
but i have a bunch of homework and lab work i need to do. the main
thing is my cell systems homework which i've already spent way too
long on.