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.

Today is Labor Day in the United States of America, which basically means people celebrate working by not working.

Of course, this doesn’t apply to me, because I went to work at the Badger Herald today to get our first issue of the semester published online. But apparently, this does apply to the bus drivers.

When I was done working, I checked the transit tracker to find out when the next bus would arrive. I clicked on my route number, direction, and location, and clicked “Get Departure Times.”

The website responded with “No Schedule Found.”

So today was the second time in the past three days that bus routes were detoured and rerouted for random reasons and I had to do extra walking. In today’s case, I had to walk all the way back home because none of the buses were in service, not even the “SAFEride” buses that are supposed to run past midnight to safely give you a ride back home.

#SafeFail

You can go ahead and criticize me for not being considerate of the bus drivers and not letting them have a day off on Labor Day, but I feel I can safely bet money on the fact that there are plenty of bus drivers who don’t care about Labor Day and would rather work and get some extra income.

If you’ve been keeping up with my blog for the past few weeks or so, you might remember a blog post about my last day of tae kwon do training at Chicago Martial Arts until this coming winter when I return home. Unlike the past, I decided to keep on training even away from home, so I joined the tae kwon do club at my university.

The club website showed that today was going to be a tae kwon do open gym from 2 PM until 4 PM. I decided to attend, so I hopped on a bus that took me from near my apartment to right in front of the gymnasium where the club meets.

I managed to find the multi-purpose sports room we were in and waited outside the locked door. About ten minutes after I arrived, a freshman who was new to the university showed up too. We sat, chatted, and waited for over half an hour but nobody showed up.

… So I went back home.

I emailed our head instructor and got a response after I returned to my apartment. Apparently he was traveling and could not attend class today, but regardless, sometimes, during open gyms, instructors don’t show up and the students can work on whatever they feel they need to work on with each other.

And apparently I could have just gone up to the front desk and asked them to unlock the room.

So yeah.

That didn’t turn out very well.

Today I discovered that in Sony Vegas Pro 10, the shortcut key combination to pause is Ctrl+F12.

Ctrl+F12?!

How is that even a shortcut?

In other news, I’m still working on getting as much Badger Herald work done before my classes get difficult. If you read yesterday’s blog post, you know that I had my first day of class yesterday, but we haven’t really gotten into anything that requires much of my attention, so I’m spending this time some extra extraneous work done.

In other other news, today was one of the days of the Taste of Madison where a bunch of people gather around and eat an excess of food unnecessarily. If you know me, you probably know that I’m not the type of person to go to something like this, and you’re right if you guessed that I didn’t go to the Taste of Madison.

The reason I’m bringing this up is that because the Taste of Madison is going on, the bus routes that go near the Herald office (which happens to be very close to the Taste of Madison) are being rerouted to completely different locations.

So what happens then?

I have to walk around for about eight blocks in a zig-zag spiral to find a bus stop that’s actually in service.

In the time it took for me to find a bus stop that’s in service, I probably could’ve just made it back home by walking.

That’s all for today; I’ll see you tomorrow with another (hopefully slightly more positive) story.