Librarians are hiding something

Nocturnal leg cramps

Wow, I sure do hate them. It feels as if half of my left calf broke off of the tendon and is just freely floating and giggling around in the back of my leg. The plus side is that they most commonly affect teenagers and people over 65. My birthday is in 3 days and I'll be turning 20, so I'd say I'm in the clear for a long time.

...what

I just noticed something at Carson's while picking up some bowls of pasta alfredo (btw, awesome). There were signs posted up around the building saying "Keep Your Eyes Peeled" with a picture of a banana. It's mild kindergarten comedy to warn people of some unknown, possibly impending danger lurking somewhere around campus, a subtle way to try to keep people weary of a campus rated to be one of the safest big campuses in the country.

It's hard to say that the posters are irresponsible or inappropriate, but it certainly feels unnecessary. I don't see the justification of warning students of a danger that may or may not be somewhere. And that's literally all it says. You might as well just put up signs randomly around sidewalks that say "Look out!" On the other hand, how many people would actually take the message seriously?

I don't have a camera, but I might be able to check one out from the dorm. Maybe that would be an interesting aspect to add to my project. I could go over the state of security in Madison and around campus. I'm sure there is info on it, but it seems like that'd be harder to find.

I hate Windows Vista

I've finally gotten rid of it from my new computer. Formatted the harddrive and put good ol' XP on.

There's just too much wrong with it to tolerate what's right with it. Aside from the overbearing DRM complaints, there are so many little things that annoy me that just makes using Vista too unbearable. The discontinuation of support of animated GIF images in the picture previewer, the numerous flaws of the UAC that prevents actions from being performed by a non-administrator, when I actually am designated as the administrator, incompatability with programs designed for XP and earlier, graphical (3D and 2D) bugs in fullscreen games, awkward folder structuring around the desktop in windows explorer, peculiar access prevention to shared folders on my own computer, higher idle CPU usage than much older computers using XP, and so on.

And in the short time that I had Vista installed (I hadn't even activated the product key, but I also couldn't, which is a whole new post that I won't bother with here), that's just what I observed firsthand. I can't imagine how much stuff I would eventually detail to be a problem in Vista if I were to keep it. On top of that, my computer only came with Windows Vista Basic, which is a toned down version for lower speced computers that otherwise wouldn't be able to handle the Aero interface. The one thing that had been advertised for Vista as a "wow" feature in commercials was the Aero interface, which still at best is an interesting way to alt+tab through windows, and I didn't even have that to bog my system down.

The only way I can see myself going back to Vista is if they release SP1 to basically fix... everything about it. Maybe then I'll consider it a legitimate OS, but until that happens, I'm holding onto XP as long as I can.

And I'm not getting a damn Mac. That's another post as well.

Volunteering

I finally got to meet my Conversation English tutee today. I was kinda surprised that he was 28 years old as I had been expecting a student my age, but he'll do fine. Our meeting went well, we sat down at the cafe in Union South for an hour and a half or so to chat about each other and meetings, and all of that. The problems he has with English are kinda interesting, stuff I've never really considered to be an issue. Aside from just not knowing words or how to pronounce words, he has trouble with different uses of verbs. Things like, the use of the word "look" in 'look out', 'look up', and 'look after'. Being a native English speaker, I never thought about how that could wind up being a problem to someone who has memorized the definition of "look" to be "seeing with your eyes". He doesn't have trouble with his Electrical Engineering textbooks but he has a hard time with watching TV and reading newspapers, mainly because the engineering textbooks use very technical terms and stuff like the newspaper and TV use a much more common words. This might wind up being a bit of a problem for my English project, or it might help out. Maybe I could ask him to watch the nightly news the day before we meet, or get a newspaper, and just talk about the contents and the story itself. He seems more focused on learning common english though, rather than the more indirect approach of just talking, but we'll see how that goes.

I should have made paragraphs.

I can't wait for this weekend.

I turned in my proposal, so that only leaves two exams to study for tonight. I'm 1/3rd done?

The proposal feels definitely stronger than what I threw together on the 15th. Not only because I have more written, but I've tried to filter out what I want to get out of the project. Or, not what I want to get out of the project, but what I want to say in the project. I get the feeling that when I'm done with the project, my original proposal will be way off of what I ended up writing about, but at least I have the hardest part done.

Coming up with the idea for a writing topic has always eluded me. I never can just sit down and brainstorm ideas out of the blue. If anything, I avoid it until an idea hits me that's possible to work with, and I run with the idea to turn it into a legitimate project. Maybe that's what brainstorming is all about, but I know for a fact that if I'm sat down in a class to spend 10 minutes writing project ideas, I'll never come up with anything. And I say I know that for a fact because it happened last semester in English 101. I didn't come up with a single idea until a day and a half later when I was in the bathroom and I played out the idea in my head.

It still seems like a daunting task to put together all these concepts into a good paper, but pulling it off seems more possible now that I have a direction.

Boston was right

It was clear, the evidence right in front of their eyes.