Schedule Fail

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This post is over 15 years old and may contain information that is incorrect, outdated, or no longer relevant.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.
 

THIS IS A TRAGEDY.

I enroll for Fall 2011 courses at my university tomorrow at 9:30 PM. The only problem is, the most important courses that I wanted to enroll in are full.

To make up for the fullness, I selected other courses, which happen to inevitably be morning courses. After frustratingly organizing my classes until my brain almost exploded, I ended up having morning classes on every day.

My previous schedule had me starting no earlier than 11 AM on each day of the week. Now, I start at 8:00 AM on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and at 8:50 AM on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

Most of you are probably calling me a wimp for not being able to wake up decently early and calling this a tragedy, but the problem is that I work during the night. I generally arrive at the office of my workplace at 10 PM and stay there until about 2 AM. By the time I go to sleep, it could be as late as 3 AM. If I wake up at 7 AM the following morning to make it to class, I would only be able to sleep four hours during the night.

Sure, I can do this for a few days, but I can’t survive like this for an entire semester. People have already suggested that I sleep in during the weekends or take naps during the day, but that can only be done so much, and doing that on such irregular intervals will end up being detrimental to my health. Also, not getting enough consecutive sleep will ultimately make the sleep that you take less effective, because you never enter the deeper stages of your sleep cycle.

My solution? It sounds lame, but I think the best way to solve this problem is for me to change my working hours from the night to the extremely early morning. For those of you who don’t know, I work at a newspaper company, and my in-office job is to make sure all the articles get published on the website.

If I sleep at 9 PM and wake up at 5 AM, I can get eight hours of continuous sleep and be able to catch the 5:43 AM bus to go to the office and finish my work before most other people wake up.

If I end up doing that, I’ll feel like an elementary schooler by going to sleep at 9 PM. -___-

 

So Far in 2011…

Number of Taco Bell tacos eaten: 24

Number of times I did my own laundry: 3

 

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Survey About Facebook Fail

by   •   Daily Post
 

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.
 

I participated in a survey today for my educational psychology course to get some extra credit.

Some of you might know that I don’t use Facebook anymore, and the only reason I sign on is if I have a specific purpose; I don’t use it for general socialization at all anymore.

Funny part about the survey?

The whole thing was about the activities we do on Facebook.

-.-

 

The Daily Post at WordPress.com

Topic #88: What is the best gift you’ve ever received? What is the worst gift you’ve ever received?

I don’t really think about gifts as good or bad, but if I were to rate them, I would consider the best gift money and the worst gift clothing.

Even if I didn’t receive as much net worth of money than other gifts, I would still prefer money because I can do what I want to do with it. If I need to use it for living expenses, I can add it to my bank account and use it to pay bills or buy necessities. If I want to buy myself a gift, I can pick something that I specifically want. Now that Internet shopping is so prevalent, I don’t even have to be concerned about wasting gas to find something I like, because I can just sit in my room and find things I need or want to buy on the computer.

Of course, if someone bought something for me that I didn’t want, I could still return it to get cash in return. However, then I would have to request a gift receipt if I didn’t already get one, find the store from which the gift was purchased, drive there, and return the gift to get the money. I would much rather receive a less valuable gift than have to go through all that work to get money.

The reason I specifically dislike clothing is because nobody ever seems to buy normal clothing for me. I always get excessively fancy clothing or clothes that are unbearably uncomfortable. I’m generally not even short of clothing anyway, seeing as I already have lots of shirts, and I occasionally get free shirts as promotional material.

 

So Far in 2011…

Number of Taco Bell tacos eaten: 24

Number of times I did my own laundry: 3

 

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Catching a Cold Fail

by   •   Daily Post
 

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.
 

So it skyrocketed up to 83°F (28°C) today.

And I think I somehow managed to catch a cold.

Either that, or the combination of vacuuming my room and turning on the air conditioner for the first time since last fall ended up releasing so much dust into the air that I can’t stop sneezing and blowing my nose.

In other news, as a follow-up to the note I posted back on March 30, 2011 about random people coming to visit me in my apartment:

Standing outside my door saying “Adam? … Adam? … Come on man, open the door … Adam?” will not increase the chances of me opening my door. If anything, it will decrease the 0% chance of me opening the door, because I don’t answer my door at all anymore.

So stop trying and wasting your time.

 

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Topic #87: Imagine you get a magic gold ticket that lets you travel through space and time to grab any band, or music act, living or dead, together or broken up, and transport them to play live at a venue near you. Who would you pick? Why?

This band selection might sound funny to everyone who doesn’t know what type of music I prefer to listen to (which essentially mirrors what type of music I prefer to perform), but if I would be able to bring back a band, I would bring back Fall Out Boy.

I realize that most other people would name really old and famous bands that have made musical revolutions, but I don’t really know many of these bands and I honestly don’t really care about them that much. For example, Michael Jackson was an icon in music, and everyone thought his death was a tragedy, but I couldn’t really care less and was annoyed by the fact that people were so emotional about his death. The only reason I ever listened to a Michael Jackson song was because Fall Out Boy did a punk rock cover of “Beat It.”

For those of you who aren’t aware, Fall Out Boy split up in February 2010 without any intention to come back together. The members stated that they’re not sure of Fall Out Boy’s future, and the decisions they make for the future will all be for the right reasons.

From my perspective, this was more tragic than Michael Jackson’s death – I like literally every single one of Fall Out Boy’s songs (which is rare, there aren’t many bands where I like literally all of their songs). So, if I were to bring back a band, it would be Fall Out Boy. If my decision keeps them together in the future, that’s great, otherwise, I’ll be someone that was at their last concert.

 

So Far in 2011…

Number of Taco Bell tacos eaten: 24

Number of times I did my own laundry: 3

 

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Making $33.33 Per Hour

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.
 

I made $200 in 6 hours today by participating in a psychology experiment. If you don’t want to do the calculation by yourself, that’s $33.33 an hour. I wish I could participate in psychology experiments as a full-time job for eight hours a day and five days a week – if all the experiments were like the one that I did today, I would be making about $70,000 a year before taxes.

The beginning of the day involved sitting in a dark room in front of a computer screen with images flashing in front of me. I placed three fingers of my right hand on the 1, 2, and 3 keys on the keyboard and rated the images as negative, neutral, or positive.

That seemed easy and innocent until they started showing me pictures of mutilated faces with crusted blood, a woman who appeared to have the world’s worst case of breast cancer, a police officer standing over a shot body, and slaughtered horses on a field.

After that, I moved on to a separate room where I played a handful of games involving probability and gambling. During one of the games, I realized that instead of putting effort into trying to guess the correct answer, I would end up getting just as many points from the game by randomly guessing.

I think the game was rigged, because out of the eight or so trials that I randomly guessed on, I got them all wrong.

After that, I had some lunch while filling out some questionnaires, then played a few more games involving economics and sight. Finally, the hardest part came up.

The experimenters put a net over my head that was supposed to measure brain wave activity. The problem was that the net had about a hundred or so nodes, and it had to be put into salt water so they would stick properly to my scalp and pick up all the activity. Putting the actual thing on my head took an extremely long time, then I had to do eight trials of an activity that takes seven to eleven minutes for each trial.

I think the reason I got paid so much is because of how frustratingly uncomfortable that last part was.

 

So Far in 2011…

Number of Taco Bell tacos eaten: 24

Number of times I did my own laundry: 2

 

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Mac OS Fail

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.
 

THE INTERNET IN MY APARTMENT IS BROKEN AGAIN.

AARGH.

Fortunately, I work at a place where I can come and go freely with a 25 mbps Internet connection, so I went to the Badger Herald office so I didn’t have to sit in my apartment Internetless or have to go to a library and have people staring at me for typing too loudly.

My desktop computer at the office has three hard drives, one that holds Windows 7 and one that is used as a network storage device. The third hard drive is empty, so I decided to install a Mac operating system on it because one of my co-workers who is planning on joining me in leading multimedia refuses to use any editing software other than Final Cut Pro.

Even though Sony Vegas Pro 10 is almost just as good.

If you ever decide to try this as well, keep this advice in mind:

Popping in a Mac OS installation disk and booting from the CD/DVD drive will not work. It will try to read the disk for a while, fail, then continue on booting from the hard drive.

If you managed to get on Google and started searching for solutions, don’t use the solutions that require you to boot from .dmg or .pkg files. You need to already have a Mac in order to read those files.

If you end up downloading files and burning them to your own DVDs and trying to install Mac OS clones, don’t. Your optical drive will most likely fail because the files are too large and the installation will die when there’s 10 minutes remaining.

If you are intelligent enough to realize that burning these files to a USB drive instead will eliminate that problem, also don’t. I spent ten minutes clicking around on PowerISO and searching Google to find out how to make a USB drive act like a CD and found nothing.

At that point, I got frustrated, quit, and went to Taco Bell.

 

So Far in 2011…

Number of Taco Bell tacos eaten: 24

Number of times I did my own laundry: 2

 

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Exams and Lucid Dreaming

by   •   Daily Post
 

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.
 

I took my philosophy exam today, and now I’m done with exams until final exam week. Even better, instead of having all my exams on the week of final exams, I have two exams on their regular final exam days and two exams the week before on the last day of classes.

The exam I took was surprisingly easy compared to the amount of reading that we had to do. We had two sets of essay questions with two prompts in each one, and we had to pick one essay from each set to answer. There were two decently-sized books that we had to read, but I think I could’ve done perfectly fine without even looking at the books and just writing based off the material we covered during lecture and discussion sections.

So if you happen to be a philosophy instructor, you should probably make your exam questions inclusive of out-of-class material as well as lecture and discussion material, or else your students might not actually read the books you recommend (what a surprise).

 

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Topic #86: If you could script tonight’s dream, what would would the plot be? There is a concept called lucid dreaming, where people are able to have some control over their dreams. Have you ever had a lucid dream? Would you want one?

If I could script tonight’s dream, I would probably script it so nothing happens and I get a full night of comfortable rest.

Normally, I would probably say that I would script it so I would be reviewing my notes for an exam, because dreams generally act as a way for your body to prepare for theoretical things that could happen in the world. If I keep on practicing taking the exam and studying the material, I would have a stronger grasp on the material for when the real exam comes around. However, I have no high-priority academic stuff to worry about right now, and there’s nothing else that I need urgent practice for, so I would probably benefit most from a night of good sleep.

I generally don’t have any lucid dreams, but I would like to train myself to have lucid dreams. I’m curious what is contained in my subconscious mind, and I think that with a combination of lucid dreaming and interpreting other uncontrollable things that happen in my dreams, I can find out what I am actually thinking subconsciously, and discover what my hidden worries may be, if I have any.

 

So Far in 2011…

Number of Taco Bell tacos eaten: 21

Number of times I did my own laundry: 2

 

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