Tip of the Day: Don’t forget to use your turn signal.

Today’s tip of the day has been provided by an old man who told me not to forget to use my turn signal while I was walking to class this morning.

In other news, follow road signs.

I intended on putting this in my blog for the past two days, and I continued to forget but finally remembered today. If you recall my blog post from September 11, you know that there was an Ironman triathalon hosted in Madison, Wisconsin on that day. Because of that, a bunch of roads were closed, and even more were marked off with warning signs.

One of the most common signs were “Road Closed Ahead, Local Traffic Only.” That means that everyone who intends on using that road to drive to a location past that road should not do so because they’re going to run into a closed road, and the only people who should use that road are people who have homes and apartments along that road.

I’m not sure if this was because people are just stupid or because they’re rebellious, but I probably saw about 20 or so cars today take the roads marked “Road Closed Ahead, Local Traffic Only” roads, keep driving, hit the closed road blocked off by police vehicles, and have to turn back around.

So if you ever happen to be in Madison in the future and there are roads with these signs next to them, don’t use them.

Or else a random blogger will notice you, laugh at you, then write about it in his blog.

Depending on how involved you are with me and my website, you might already know that I am the web director at the Badger Herald. You might also know that this past summer, I created a file submission form for the Badger Herald so our readers could submit files to us anonymously (and I posted about it on my blog and asked my readers to help me find bugs with it).

It seems like people have been putting the form to good use. Although we get quite a bit of spam, we also get some useful information.

Earlier today, I got an image submission titled “eyebrows.png.” Curious to see what it was, I opened it up and found this:

I did not know that such things as double eyebrows even existed, let alone triple double eyebrows.

Don’t you hate it when you’re walking behind four people who feel as if it’s necessary to all walk side-by-side like a human barrier so nobody can pass them?

Me too.

I particularly hate it when I’m trying to walk back to my office after buying a burger from Five Guys (they have one of the most awesome burgers ever) (no, this is not a sponsorship or a paid adver­tisement) and this human barrier is slowing me down such that I’m unable to return to my office and eat my burger as quickly as if they weren’t there.

In other news, I think I’m finally done hiring for the web department at the Badger Herald. I did my final interview today, and I’ve narrowed the potential candidates down to the two people who have the most experience with stuff relevant to what my department will be doing this coming semester and in the future in general.

Also, special shoutout to Vivian Seeger, who found the Badger Herald through the link at the bottom of my profile page and sent me an application to be the new associate web director (and mentioned that she was a frequent reader of my blog). It was great reading your application, but unfortunately, the fact that you are not a student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (and the fact that you live in an entirely different state to begin with) disqualifies you for the position. Thanks for applying, though.

Tip of the Day: If you wake up in the morning and open your blinds to look outside, and notice that there’s someone gazing back at you, put your glasses on before wondering why someone’s staring at you.

Because nobody’s actually staring at you, it’s just a garbage can.

The end of today officially marks the end of my first week of my second year of university (today and not tomorrow because we had class last Friday). Although I can’t really give a good overview of all my classes yet because none of my labs met this week, I can say for sure that my social enterprise course feels like it’s built for middle school children. We spend about a fifth of the class period waiting for people to volunteer to speak, and we’re “learning” about things a small child would be able to figure out using common sense.

My social theory course is a bit more interesting. The topic we’re covering now is an old topic that comes up frequently in many social science courses, but my in­structor talks about it in a way that makes it worth learning more about. This sociological theory course is a requirement for the sociology major and most people would probably not take it if they didn’t have to, but something about my instructor says that even though the topics might not always be interesting, the course still isn’t going to be boring.

My psychological statistics course is taught by a relatively old professor who gives off the impression of being really good at what he does, and being able to do it in an efficient and friendly manner. The downside to this course is that it involves a lot of math, but at least we get to use a formula reference for everything (inclu­ding exams) and the focus of the course is on the con­cepts rather than the calculations.

Finally, my zoology course seems like a basic biology course that someone would take during high school. I haven’t really gotten any strong impressions from it other than the fact that it’s probably not going to be one of my favorite classes because I have historically had a difficult time with all biology-like courses I have ever taken. Also, we have so many students in the lecture that we can’t fit everyone in the lecture hall and some people have to sit on the floor in the aisles.

Tip of the Day: If your default reply function is set to Reply All and you’re replying to an email that was sent to an extremely large mailing list, make sure to remove the mailing list from the recipients before hitting Send, or else this will happen.

So the story behind this image?

I took Sociology 131 last semester at my university. One of the teaching assistants made a mistake and sent out a mass email to an old mailing list from last semester rather than the new one from this semester. I didn’t realize this and thought there was only one mailing list for Sociology 131, and asked to be removed from it because I took Sociology 131 last semester.

I also didn’t realize that I forgot to remove the mailing list from the recipients, so when I asked the teaching assistant to remove me from the mailing list, the entire mailing list also got a copy of my email.

I then set off a chain reaction where everyone else started asking to be removed from the mailing list. However, instead of replying to Amanda’s message, they replied to mine.

You’ve probably guessed it by now – instead of sending the removal request to the teaching assistant, they instead sent the request to me and only me.

I’ve had a handful of fails related to mailing lists in the past, but I think this is the most interesting fail, seeing as the fail was done by the seven people who don’t know how to use email.

If you follow me on Twitter, you probably already know that I used an automatic dishwasher for the first time in my life a few days ago.

I only have about ten plates and bowls, two cups, and a handful of eating utensils to wash anyway, which isn’t much and wouldn’t take long to do it by hand, but I decided to test out the dishwasher, both for the experience and because my apartment started charging an extra flat fee of $10.75 for water and sewage this year.

A few things to keep in mind when using the dishwasher:

Don’t put plastic stuff in there. I don’t exactly know what happens inside the dishwasher after I close it, but after the cycle was done, I opened it and all the plastic containers I put in there were all over the place. One of them was hanging off a fork, another flew up to the top compartment, and another fell to the bottom near the spinning blades (of death).

The soap that you use in the dishwasher is different than the one you use to wash your dishes by hand. I fortunately already knew this, but one of my Twitter followers reminded me (even though he was two days late). If you’re curious what happens if you do use regular soap in an automatic dishwasher, have no fear, Jenna Ezarik already did it for you and vlogged about it a little less than a year ago.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MHlDj_KTNGQ

My experience was a tad bit more successful. A few of the plates on which I ate rice came out a little dirty because apparently dried rice doesn’t wash off very easily in automatic dishwashers. But other than that, I’m glad I used this dishwasher and saved ten or so minutes of my life.