Things I've learned in the last 24 hours

1. When the hard drive of a MacBook starts to go, it behaves just like a laptop running Windows.

2. Hard drive failures are a lot less stressful when the computer is still under warranty and there is just enough life left in the drive to do a full backup.

3. Watching a computer report that there are fewer and fewer files in a directory each time you click on it is somewhat disconcerting, item 2 (above) notwithstanding.

4. The order of priority of my electronic files appears to be: sabbatical research data, kid pictures, other documents. In fairness, the kid picture folder was 1 GB, the research folder was more like 10 MB.

5. To describe the same program, art faculty come up with entirely different graphics than science faculty do.

6. Other faculty members who want to needle you about how the upper division students in their class can't do stuff they should have learned in your class should first check to make sure said students have taken your class. While they are at it, perhaps it would be best if they recalled that they had in fact advised said students to wait to take your class until next year.