RLPF.ar

It's done! I'm no longer living in temporary quarters on campus. It's a vast improvement in living condition: a brand new apartment, bought as an investment property and rented to us. That means it's clean, unlike any other place we viewed. It's small by US standards, but luxurious for Chinese and plenty of space for Jimmy and myself. We are away from the main roads and free of the worst city noise.

I don't have many pictures yet as the rooms are not quite put together. Here are some from the balcony in the meantime. The Guangzhou Science Center, a science and technology museum for kids (of all ages!), is easy to see on a clear day -- it's the one that looks like cruise ships piled up on each other. It rained heavily in the morning before I took this picture; that cleared the smog out of the air. Most days, the outline is barely visible.

The neighborhood has an organic quality to the layout -- by "organic," some might mean confusing, but I prefer this to the view from a balcony at the competing Clifford development, overlooking straight rows upon rows of identical buildings. The bus stop where I will catch the bus to work twice a week is pretty close to the center of the frame, about 15 minutes on foot.

We're on the 17th floor!

One room in the house is ready to go, at least -- some would say, the most important room.

Other rooms... problems. Today, we were supposed to have cable TV installed and furniture delivered: dining chairs and my studio desk. Neither showed up. Nor did the washing machine repairman, who was supposed to pay a warranty visit. Of the three things that were supposed to be accomplished, none of them came through!

The furniture is the main disappointment. We are eating around the coffee table because there are no chairs to sit down properly for a meal. For me, a desk -- a space set aside for work -- is a good motivator that I don't have at the moment. It takes extra mental effort to focus on composing while sitting on a couch with a laptop on the coffee table and a keyboard on my lap. Supposedly they are coming tomorrow, but supposedly they were supposed to come today. Holding my breath would seem to carry some risk to my health.

Can't resist a little geek stuff: I started using org-mode in Emacs as a notepad and outliner for the Kennedy Center project, but realized pretty quickly it would be a great way to keep track of my teaching schedule, appointments, concerts to attend, teaching notes, attendance records and grades -- pretty much everything, and all in plain text. It's a rare design in an age of proprietary, binary formats that are useless without expensive commercial software. All the data in the file are legible in a normal text editor, but become much more useful in Emacs, where outline trees expand and collapse with one keystroke, plaintext tables automatically format themselves, and timelines and weekly agendas pop up with short commands. The convenience for me is that I'm already using Emacs for supercollider programming; I already have the environment open for long stretches of time. I can't say I would recommend learning Emacs just to use org-mode, but it's deep. I've just scratched the surface, but even at this level of use, it's nice to open one file for my whole semester's data, hit control-c a < a, and see everything on my calendar for the week.

Teaching: Indeed, my students overestimated their prior knowledge. I'm back on track.