Grades, thoughts and other stuff

Got my math grade back from what may well be the last (explicitly) math class I ever take: I got a C in Math 380. That was my first, and quite possibly last upper division math class. It' s not that I hate Math. I really like that feeling of accomplishment when you figure out how to make those bizarre characters and numbers in those formulas dance. It's the most primal form of knowledge and wisdom out there. Unfortunately, it all too often escapes my limited mind, and once again I find myself in a position where I can't really afford to do poorly in classes that I'm taking for the sake of "learning". Who knows, if I do get into a doctorate program (which is far less likely after this summer) I may take a few like linear algebra and differential equations for the sake of learning while in the program (probably on a pass/no-pass basis) or if I decide that there's no way I'm going to do a doctorate (or get rejected) I may take the classes at a community college. Though to be fair to me, that's a tie for the best college Math grade I have received. I earned a D- in Math 1B at Berkeley (2nd semester Calculus), a D in Math 6A at El Camino Community College (multivariable calculus) and a C in Math 55 at Berkeley (discrete math). Yes, scarily I was officially a member of Palos Verdes Peninsula's Math department for 2 years. But anyways, the grade should be enough to keep me in line to graduate with the masters in Computer Science next May, which is the immediate priority. All that's left is my thesis (2 semesters), my remaining requirements and my remaining pre-requisite courses that I'm leaving to the end.
I still don't know if I really want to pursue the doctorate, but for now it still seems like a safe target to aim for until I figure things out.
On the plus side, my restoration of my scrambled server volume is mostly complete. I lost a total of about 12 gigabytes of lossless albums on one of my 3 250 gig drives after I scoured my backups to recover what I could. About 13 Beatles albums (out of my original 430) were in that 12 gigabytes, but overall, not too much was lost. And yes, I've been very carefully backing up everything to dvd-rs. Everything but the volume being restored is safely burned with verify mode on. Once I have fully backed up everything (and possibly burned a 2nd copy of my backups) I will go through with my massive raid-5 server build. I have the drives for it, but I want to be as sure as possible I won't lose any more data in the process. I'm also probably going to take another stab at Gentoo linux in the process. I have a friend, Jeremy Huddleston, (whose blog is listed on the right) who's on one of their dev teams, plus I may end up doing some projects with gentoo in the next few months so I'm sort of obligated to switch off of Debian/Knoppix. So once again, everyone, BACK UP YOUR DATA. Don't waste time, just do it. Restoring data over the span of a few weeks or worse yet, losing important data, is just no fun.