The good news is that my sleep is finally back on track. This morning I woke up at 8:00, and checked my email only to realize that I had signed up for an Advanced CSS course at the Oxford Computing center. CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets, and is the means by which most modern web pages are constructed. Instead of containing both the content and the formal construction of a web page in one file, CSS allows designers to create a single file which contains instructions for an entire website’s visual style and layout. This eliminates a lot of unnecessary duplication, since each page no longer has to contain these instructions. Anyway, it’s of interest to me in a peripheral sense. I’m very interested in the possible melding of arts and technology, so I feel like learning these things may be of use to me somewhere down the line.

Anyway, I enjoyed the overall atmosphere of the OUCS, even though the class itself was rather hands-off and unstructured. People in many walks of the computing field have a certain relaxed air about them, a certain sense of humor, that I find endearing. I think it’s a survival mechanism, the only way to cope when you’re immersed in a world like a bucking bronco where things can change suddenly and pull the rug out from under you, both in the long term (declining and emerging technologies) and short term (server crashes, lost data). It may be why I didn’t succeed, in a personal sense, in an IT career.

Tonight we hosted the New College exchange; several graduates came to dine with us. Some I had met when we went to New last term, but other faces were new. Okay, for me it’s more accurate if I say “voices.” We had quite a pleasant evening. The dinner menu looked unpromising, featuring an entr?e of bacon chop with pineapple and barbecue sauce and spotted dick for dessert. Fortunately, the meal tasted better off the plate than it looked on paper. I also engaged in some great conversations with several of the friendly New folks.

In particular, a couple of us discussed starting up a creative writing student organization. Both of us know several people who are interested in pursuing creative writing at some level, but are unable to find a community here in Oxford. So, I’m making a concerted efort in the next week to find out how one goes about starting a student society here.

Now I must go to bed soon, or the great gains in “normal sleeping”I made last night will be all undone. We’re going to Stratford tomorrow evening, which frankly I’m not too excited about. I’ve seen the play (Great Expectations) already, and with only three of us from Trinity going the social element in the trip is much diminished. Still, I think other Oxford students will be on the bus–it’s a private package for Oxford students–so who knows what chance encounters I’ll have along the way. I was the one who suggested the play, and especially since the graduate social secretary backed out I think I better carry the torch.