by   •   General
 

This post is over 15 years old and may contain information that is incorrect, outdated, or no longer relevant.
My views and opinions can change, and those that are expressed in this post may not necessarily reflect the ones I hold today.
 

(As you can clearly see, this is a very text-heavy and possibly boring blog post. Don’t read it if you have a life.)

I just realized that it’s been a week since I last posted in my blog and ten days since I’ve made a video. I actually intended to post a video on Tuesday, November 8, 2010, which was a day after my most recent video, but I ended up not having enough time on that day. I kept procrastinating until I ended up forgetting about it for a while. The topic of the video was slightly time-based as well – it was a story about daylight savings time. I still want to film and post the video, but I’m not sure when I’ll have enough time to do it.

The main reason I’ve been overly absent online for the past week is because of an upcoming calculus exam. I fell behind on the stuff we were learning, and eventually, I fell so far back that it was hard to seize opportunities to catch up. I have an exam this coming Thursday, and I’m still behind – I’ve been trying to learn calculus like crazy this past week, but it hasn’t been working very well. I’m going to continue this failing effort until Thursday before the exam to try to get as high of a score as possible on the exam, because, even though they’re both horrible, a C is still better than a D.

I’m expecting to be more available website-wise after this Friday. I’ll be spending most of late Thursday night and Friday doing a programming assignment for computer science, which, with respect to the amount of time we were given to do it, I am also behind on. Once I get that out of the way, the only major thing I have left before my Thanksgiving recess is a Spanish exam, but those tend to work out well even without extreme intensive studying. I should also catch up on my reading for botany, which hasn’t gotten any easier – if you happen to remember (or happen to have even seen) the picture of my botany binder from a while back, my binder now is about twice as thick as shown in the picture. I’ll eventually post another picture of how much my binder has grown.

I also noticed that I’m getting really bad at tweeting when I’m posting new blog posts, and I think I’m losing a handful of views on each of my blog posts because of that. I’ll try to remember more often.

 

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by   •   Daily Shoot
 

This post is over 15 years old and may contain information that is incorrect, outdated, or no longer relevant.
My views and opinions can change, and those that are expressed in this post may not necessarily reflect the ones I hold today.
 

 

Picture of the Day

I’m Up So High

Since the beginning of the year, I’ve had problems with Advanced Placement transfer credits showing up correctly in my degree audit report. I had seven separate AP scores for tests that I took during high school, but I only got credit for one of them. I tried emailing and calling people asking them to solve the problem, but that didn’t work. I decided to go find out the solution to this problem myself.

First I went to the walk-in advising office for the College of Letters and Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. I talked with an adviser for several minutes, and she concluded that there was nothing she could do about this problem. She suggested that I go to the registrar’s office.

Apparently, they had to put the registrar’s office on the eleventh floor. I got on the elevator, and after pausing at the 3rd, 4th, 6th, 7th, and 10th floors, I finally made it to the 11th floor. I looked out the office windows and realized that this was the highest point I’ve been at in Madison, so I decided to snap a picture.

Unfortunately, the people at the registrar’s office also didn’t know how to solve my problem, and they suggested that I go to the place that actually receives the AP score report directly from College Board, the admissions department.

At this point it felt like I was calling a customer service line for a too-large-for-its-own-good company, and was being forwarded over and over again from department to department. The only problem was that instead of going from line to line like in a phone call, I had to walk from building to building.

I finally made it to the building that was home of the admissions department. Of course, admissions had to be on the upper-most floor, so I got on the elevator. When I looked at the buttons, I realized that admissions wasn’t exactly on the third floor – it was just labeled that way. Apparently there are multiple subfloors between the first and second floors and the second and third floors, making the third floor more or less the sixth or seventh floor.

After finally reaching the admissions desk, I had a small chat explaining my problem, and they told me to fill out a yellow message form that would be delivered to someone that could solve my problem. This sort of defeated the purpose of my elongated trip because I planned on solving the problem in person, but I was rapidly running out of options so I explained my problem for the fifth time, this time in words on paper.

Believe it or not, it worked – the following morning at 6:05 AM, someone re-evaluated my Advanced Placement scores and I got all my credits.

Two hours later, a staff adviser I had emailed two or three days prior to my quest responded to my email saying, “I just checked your account and it appears to be that everything is entered properly, what exactly is the problem you are having?”

(Photo taken using an Apple iPhone)

 

The Daily Shoot Assignment of the Day

#DS360

Gauges, meters, and turn signals are all indicators. Make a photograph of an indicator that catches your attention today.

 

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by   •   What I'm Reading
 

This post is over 15 years old and may contain information that is incorrect, outdated, or no longer relevant.
My views and opinions can change, and those that are expressed in this post may not necessarily reflect the ones I hold today.
 

 

Picture of the Day

The Remains...

The remains of the baked potato that I just ate.

 

What I’m Reading

For my readers that have stuck with me for a long time, you may or may not remember this section I used to have called “What I’m Reading” where I described books that I was reading. I haven’t had this section of my blog since the end of the summer, but for those of you that were actually interested in this section, I have good news – I will most likely be bringing it back soon.

The main problem was that I wasn’t able to find a generic library here on my university campus. I know of several libraries, but all of them are specific libraries dedicated to specific topics. Simply going to one of these libraries wasn’t sufficient for finding some good books to read for entertainment. That, in addition to my increased busyness, made it more difficult to read for fun.

However, a few days ago, I managed to get a hold of electronic copies (which may or may not be legal) of books that I was interested in reading for a while. I have six in total – two of them are The Hunger Games and Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins, and the other four are the four books in the ever-so-controversial Twilight series. I actually have not read a single Twilight book before, but regardless of the implications reading the books may have, I feel it’s important enough to read a book that has gained such popularity in modern-day culture.

I’m not quite sure when I’m going to start reading, but hopefully it will be soon, and hopefully I will finish my first book in a few days. I’ll have my normal “What I’m Reading” section in my blog when I finish the book.

 

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Canadian Bacon

by   •   General
 

This post is over 15 years old and may contain information that is incorrect, outdated, or no longer relevant.
My views and opinions can change, and those that are expressed in this post may not necessarily reflect the ones I hold today.
 

 

Picture of the Day

Click on the image for more information.

 

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