the end of the first.

christmas trees have been kept in storage boxes to slumber for its usual 10 months and lights that outline the doors and rooftops have been left unswitched when nightfall comes. though the wind has only wound up its chill, there is no doubt that christmas has passed and in a day's time, so will january.

the year is fresh but how mine started in a tempest! for one, i'm already dumped with articles and books that i have to read and my first machine project in advanced computer architecture is due just a few 20 days away. translation? i have to stop time or ask either god or the whole of christianity to squeeze in an extra day during weekends. gone are the days where i spent my saturdays sleeping just to catch up on the week's lost sleep. it's notoriously reminiscent of my Azeus days only this time, i teach CCNA classes. i have learned that work + 8 units of teaching load + 3 units research load + 6 units of MS + spending saturday am teaching CCNA classes to professionals who absolutely have no networking background might just mean the death of me.

the BIR project is finally deployed and is finally on its testing phase, which left me with three working weekends this month juggling between bug fixes, more QA and documentation. whose idea was it anyway to leave the documentation to the ladies? ever since college, i was always stuck with documentation. which is awful because it meant that i have an item more to do than everyone else in our group. and my usual death sentence? it was because i was the only female in the group. great. cavemen. ftw.

on the other side of the fence, i found time last friday to visit the parlor as a surprise for cy. let's just say that he was in a fixed state of a grin when he saw what i did with my hair (well actually, what i had the stylist do with my hair).

golden for this month is that i have found the joy of Latex (that's 'la-tek for you), which is a document markup language. it is for word documents (in pdf at that!) as html is for web content. it's like programming your document i.e:

\documentclass[12pt]{article}
\title{\LaTeX}
\date{}
\begin{document}
% content here
\end{document}

equipped with syntax, control sequences, and parameters. and the cherry on top? you even have to compile it! geeky i must admit - and i usually don't, which says a lot - but it saves me from using the joke that is MSOffice whenever i'm stuck doing documentation for the neanderthals.

breathe. focus. i'm almost there.