Shouzer

It amazes me how lazy kids are these days. I’m at work right now, and some kid just called me to ask about graphing a polar function. It was not an easy function to graph, so I had to go back and look at a few examples to figure it out. It turned out that one of the examples in the book was exactly the same problem execept her problem was multiplied by 3. If she had just looked back through the book, she would have seen that and known how to do it.

It seems like people here do the same thing. If they get stuck on a problem, they immediately go ask someone for help instead of trying to figure it out. That someone used to be one of my suitemates until he started refusing to help people since we do have tutors that live literally next door to us, and they get paid to help people do their homework. Anyway, I think most people would be able to figure it out if they would just look at the problems in the book instead of just going to ask someone for help everytime they hit a snag. How are they going to perform in industry when they hit a problem? Go ask someone for help? Their boss is going to get sick of that really quick.

Anyway, that’s enough of a rant for tonight. I’ll probably quit my tutoring job at the end of the year, but I did say that last year too. For all of you studying to be teachers, I pity you.

Since the Illini have made it to the Final Four, the exam I had next Tuesday was delayed until Thursday. That was pretty nice, I thought. The stupid thing is that the exam I have Monday night, the night of the championship game, is still on. That leads me to two conclusions.

1. Teacher A is pretty cool.
2. Teacher B is a dick.

That’s pretty much all I could get out of it.

In other news, I’m sick for some reason. I don’t have any reason why, as I’d been getting good amounts of sleep over break and everything. Who knows. It’s not real bad, so that’s always a plus. I just know that I didn’t used to get sick as often as I do now. Dorm living, I suppose. Though, honestly, I felt sick right when I woke up at home on Monday.

Depauw is another small private school about 30 minutes from here who is also a big rival of Rose-Hulman.

Many of the students have T-shirts that say “Depauw sucks” on them. So some lawyer comes to a basketball game and is outraged that his children have to see such dirty language at a fine upstanding school. So he wrote a letter to the school newspaper complaining about it. (I would link, but it doesn’t seem to have the letter on the website).

Basically, he said that he expected Rose students have a higher standard, as opposed to students at a state school. He thought we should be wearing suits instead of dirty shirts.

So this week, the students responded with 2 letters to the editor and a few editorials. So instead of complaining in a constructive manner like that, I’m going to whine hear. I think it’s stupid that we should be expected to live at a higher standard just because we’re smart, and even that’s questionable.

So now the school is going try to replace these T-shirts with some milder version. I think they have something around 500 of these things floating around campus.

I found this program that sets up your Gmail account like it’s a hard drive. It’s a pretty nifty little app.

Here’s the link

I’ll admit that I’ve never been good about posting over break. Generally a major reason for that is that I’m simply not on the computer very much, especially breaks like this where I didn’t even bring my computer home.

Break has been going good, though. Honestly I haven’t done a lot, but that doesn’t matter to me. Some people need a lot of stuff going on to keep them happy, but not me. I’m content to just sit around and watch tv or play Xbox.

Illinois plays again tonight. They really shouldn’t have much troubly with Wisconsin-Milwaukee, but who knows. I’m actually looking forward to the Arizona OK State game and a couple others more than the Illinois game. I mean, of course I want to see Illinois play, but the game shouldn’t be as good as some of the others.

The sophomore class at Rose has some extra money so our class president decided to spend it on the students. He sent an email to us yesterday saying that if you were having a group gathering of 10 or more people (in the sophomore class at Rose), the school will buy you food from any restaraunt in town that has take-out. So one of my suitemates immediately mobilized an “event”, and now 34 people on our floor are getting free food at the cost of just under $300. I think we’re actually going to have to hang out together while we eat it, because the president is supposed to come by and see it. It was originally just supposed to be get some free food, but we might have to have a college basketball party or a movie watching party or something. That’s no sweat off my back, I’d probably be doing something similar to that anyway. We’re getting this free food from the best restaurant in Terre Haute, Exotic Thai.

Thai food is magnificent. If you’ve never tried it, then you should go out and get some for dinner tonight. I assure you that you will like it, unless you find a crappy Thai place. I have never had bad Thai food though, so that’s not real likely. If you don’t like Asian food, you should try it anyway because it’s not the same as Chinese. So go, right now, and get some.

And just like that, I thought of something to write a post about. Seems like that always happens to me…

Anyway, one of my suitemates and I have gotten into cooking recently. Mostly because on campus cooking sucks horribly, and we’re getting tired of eating at the Subway on campus.

Up until now, we would just cook some fajitas or stir-fry because they are relatively easy, and they taste really good too. However, we’ve started to experiment with new recipes because those 2 dishes are getting a little old too. We made some fried rice first, but we just made that up. It did not turn out all that well.

Next, we went on to the Ginger Orange Chicken. It was pretty good, especially for the effort it took. I’ll probably cook it again, if I ever get bored with coming up with new stuff.

Then, we tried Tom Yum Soup, which is a Thai dish. This is some of the best stuff I’ve every eaten. I would highly recommend trying it if you enjoy eating. It’s worth the effort to cook. I would like to say that I found this recipe, but it was my suitemate.

Last night, we cooked Chicken Gyros. They were pretty good, I would say they were as good as the Orange Chicken. However, the spices were pretty expensive, so it probably wasn’t worth the money. Now that I already have the spices, I would be willing to cook it again. The gyros would have been a whole lot better if we could have found some decent pita bread, and using lamb instead of chicken would have helped too.

Anyway, that’s my cooking story for the day. If we try anything else, I might let you know, depending on the response. It’s my suitemate’s turn to come up with a new recipe, so we’ll see what happens. We’ll probably cook again this weekend.

Today I was surfing the internet in my hours of boredom/procrastination, and I stumbled across a few different blogs. It occurred to me that there are people out there with some really interesting lives, and I am not one of them. Either that, or I just do not know how to effectively communicate the interesting stories in my life. Part of the problem is that my most interesting stories usually involve some sort of embarrassment on my part, and while I’m sure that would be entertaining for the reader, I do not have a much desire to write about such things. When embarrassing things happen, I tend to like to keep them to myself. So I could go through my different stories from this year that no one who reads this blog would know, but I’m not gonna.

Since my normal life basically consists of school work and caring for my basic needs (eating and sleeping) I don’t have much to write about. I guess what I’m trying to do is explain my long absence from posting, but it’s probably not a good excuse. I’m sure I could find something interesting to write about if I looked hard enough, but I’m just too lazy.

Yay for the little shiny things in life. I was at the Galleria today and stopped in the Apple store and bought myself my very own iPod mini. It’s a silver one. I got the mini because I figured 4 gigs is enough for me for my music tastes.

On a side note…yay for my Catholic university and giving us this Thursday-Monday off for Easter! w00t.

Hope you guys all enjoyed your spring breaks. Did anybody go anywhere or do anything exciting?

We won, and I suppose that’s all that matters, but we just didn’t look that good. I’ve certainly seen us play a lot of games where we just came out looking like a better team than tonight.

We’ve got Nevada next, and we should be able to win that too. They’ve got a little size, which people generally think is our weakness. Hopefully they’re wrong.

I’m not sure how I how get this lucky, but I always end up in good groups when I have big projects. Everytime, I end up with some kid who decides to do it himself. That’s what happened with both of my big group projects last year.

This year, I have a project that lasts all quarter in my mechanical systems class. It was assigned last week. My partner came back this and pretty much had it done. So we’ve got 7-8 weeks left to tweak it.

On the downside, the people I end up with aren’t always the coolest, but if they do my work for me I can’t really complain.

As I’m sure you can tell by looking at the main page, it’s been a slow few days from us at Shouzer. Sorry about that. I would say that I’ve been busy, but I haven’t. I mean, I’ve been busy, but I don’t think Halo 2 counts as a legitimate excuse.

Scott had his break last week and had to go back to school this week. Our break isn’t until next week so we were all still here over the weekend, and I suggested that Scott come up on Saturday and head out for Terre Haute from here on Sunday, which he did.

It was pretty cool hanging out for a night with Scott and everything. Being as we’re all in college now, we don’t see a lot of the people we used to see everyday. The weird thing is that it will only get worse once we actually graduate, too.

In school-related news, I dominated my Physics final. (Seems like I’ve got physics stuff all the time, huh?). Thankfully, that was my last Physics course. Ever.

I’m not quite sure how, but I managed to pull a mean 98% on the final, which gave me an A+ in the course. By “not quite sure how”, I don’t mean that I thought I would fail it or anything. It’s just that things don’t usually go as you hope they will or as you think they should as far as exams are concerned. I’ve had my fair share of rapage from exams lately, so I guess it was about time I returned the favor.

It’s coming.

I got to my first day of Fluid and Thermal Systems today, and I met Lazy Wayne. People call him that because he really doesn’t care about his job, and he lets students coast through his classes.

He told us that, “Homework counts for 15% of your grade, and I really don’t care if you do it right. I care more that you attempt it. So when I look through the grade book at the end of the year, if you did all the assignments, you get full credit.” He continued, “I’ll pretty much work out all of the tests beforehand. That’s what I did with the final last quarter, the students just didn’t know it at the time.” He explained why he doesn’t care. “I know you guys don’t care about this class because you’ll never use this stuff. The only reason we teach it is because some accreditation boards says that we have to. So I figure, you mine as well get an easy A.”

He then proceeded to let us out of class after 10 minutes. That was really more because he was jet-lagged though. Anyway, I think I’m going to like him.

So I was looking at the academic calendar tonight and talking to my sister. We stumbled across the fact that I won’t be break during Easter. Easter is March 27th. Good Friday is on March 25th. My break starts on April 1st and goes through April 11th. I had just assumed that the break coincided with Easter. It’s pretty stupid that it doesn’t.

I guess Spring Break is always after week 4 of the quarter. I thought that they just put it after week 4 last year because that was when Easter was. Now it looks like that was just a coincidence.

This thoroughly bites. That means I’m not going to get to see anyone or spend Easter with my family. Stupid school.