Education is not filling a pail but the lighting of a fire. -William Butler Yeats

Today is the first day of school. I am currently sitting in Robarts (the “looks-like-a-peacock” library) on campus; I finished registering and paying some fees about an hour ago and now have an hour to wait until the start of our barbecue. After the barbecue it’s off to a mandatory workshop, then home for a bit, and then back out again for the opening day assembly. I do not feel like a graduate student at all; I keep having this sort of daydream that the faculty is going to get wise to their mistake and unceremoniously throw me out the doors.

I took some pictures of the bracelet and earrings that I made that I had mentioned in my previous post. I tried to upload them on Friday night using Alex’s computer, but could not get into Blogger. Then I could not get into Gmail and then I couldn’t get to Google at all! I kept either getting an IE “internet connection error” or getting bounced to MSN’s new search engine Bing. I began to think this more than a little odd when I was able to reach all of the Google sites on my Blackberry. Finally I did a little searching around on the internet (obviously not using Google, but rather Yahoo; Ya-boo! is more like it) and found, through some reading, that it appears that Microsoft is trying to force people to use their services (i.e. Hotmail and Bing) rather than Google by not allowing them to reach Google sites at certain points while using IE. Alex decided to try downloading Firefox (which is my preferred browser, although I’d also like to try Google Chrome) after I told him what I thought the problem was, and the problem was solved! Also, the internet is way faster now. There you go, in case you start experiencing some of the same problems. I can’t see how it can possibly be legal (never mind ethical) for IE to basically be blocking websites just because it wants to; seems fishy to me.

Sorry about that long story, here’s a picture for you (a bit blurry, but it just can’t be helped sometimes). You can also see a little corner of one of the watercolours I completed last week.

Time to go and get some work done. I hope everyone had a great Labour Day and is enjoying the first day back to school; even if you’re not in school or have children who are in school, that first day of the new year is always a little special.