I was rudely awakened today by a persistent scraping sound.

It seems that the apartment next to me is undergoing some kind of renovation which involves constantly scraping things against the wall next to my bed.

They couldn't have waited until, you know, normal working hours to do this? It was absolutely imperative that they start at 8 AM? Christ, I'm a college student and all, but I was gonna wake up at 9, honest!

The more of these weekly HCI seminars I go to, the more glad I am that I'm getting (partially) out of academia, at least as far away as commercial research. The speaker today had been part of a research team developing a chat/IM application to facilitate communication between teams at multiple sites around the world. He did all kinds of empirical studies and yadda yadda yadda line graph, and what he ended up with was essentially a poor AIM knockoff.

Begging the question - why not just use AIM?

Meanwhile, another one of my friends has gotten engaged. Copycats, the lot of 'em.