Realm of the Imponderable

RDOC #37

The more I think about it the more I think that anthropology was a mistake, but then I had no way of knowing when I first signed up for the course at first did I?
Don't get me wrong, it's a good course, it's that the prof is getting really bad at lecturing on stuff that matters and instead he goes on in circles and prints out lecture notes that are only good for tinder. If it were a different prof I'd be having a much better time right now...
To his credit though, he did teach the first few chapters pretty well. Right now the whole course is muddled up enough that the upcoming test includes chapters that he hasn't covered yet and these chapters aren't in the textbook.
There is, however, one good point about this course: My graduate student instructor is a pretty good looking Taiwanese lady...

RDOC #36

Went to downtown detroit last saturday. It's a dilapidated run down shell of a city that you wouldn't want to drive around (Let alone walk around) at night. The shops often have iron grills over the windows (the fine mesh type that stops thrown rocks as well), and a lot of windows have holes made by rocks or bullets.
Anyway I was with my uncle and we were trying to get to Greek town in the center of Detroit to check out the place and have lunch. As expected, we got lost after parking the car and spent about half an hour or so walking around one building trying to find the correct exit.
Lunch was a cosy little greek restaurant that served cheese flambe and over salted stuffed vine leaves. (I'm beginning to think that that's the way they eat that stuff over in Greece)

After all that getting lost and eating singed cheese we had only an hour to rush the Ford Museum and amazingly (Well, not really for me; I've breezed through museums in ten minutes before) we managed to cover almost everything in that hour. It's a good place to check out if you're in Detroit.

Term is now approaching the "slow boil" stage... It's a situation where you're at boiling point and it's ok if they keep the lid off and allow us sufficient time to do our stuff but if they give ridiculous deadlines for assignments and shut the lid in the pot something's going to explode soon.

RDOC #35
OMG it snowed yesteraday. And it's only mid november...
And guess what? Intelligent me goes out for class without my jacket. And my going out involved making a trip to central campus and returning to my cosy little room only at night. And it was blowing really hard too; the snowflakes-fly-horizontally kind of wind...
Oh well, maybe it really is time for me to break out the trusty jacket.. I've been avoiding using it because of two reasons: a) It's inconvenient to carry around. b) I always forget to bring it out with me anyway.
Our little corridor 1000 community (me, Eugene and the two dudes across the corridor from us) started on a Diablo 2 spree this week... Its both good and bad because it provides lots of entertainment while keeping us up at the wee hours of the morning. Still, we beat the game in 4 sessions which I think isn't too bad. One of the guys is the guru who knows the whole game inside out and has probably hundreds of playing hours on it.
Had a math test yesterday and it got Eugene and me into a bad mood so we played d2 for about 5 hours that night.
It wasn't really difficult but it was rushed because they gave barely enough time to do it. And of course, the I would have really appreciated it if the guy would give warning at 10 minutes to time instead of suddenly saying "you have 1 minute left" from out of the blue. Think of a grenade as opposed to a slow bubbling pot...
And speaking of slow bubbling pots, that's what the term is comnig to right now.

RDOC #34

Went for tech day yesterday. It's basically a recruitment exercise for UMICH where they get high schools students interested in studying Engineering here. As with any open house, there were yours of the various departments, speeches and interactive displays and booths.

So I was one of the group leaders bringing a bunch of students around the place and showing them the sights. I was interesting, because on the department tours they showed us stuff that I've never seen before, even though I've been here more than 2 months. Of particular interest was the aerospace engineering department, where they showed us their most impressive hardware like massive wind tunnels and small supersonic wind tunnels. Then there was also the biomed department where they showed us their functional MRI machine. (Yup. It's the only MRI in the US that's not found in a hospital) They tossed a few coins into the machine to demonstrate what would happen if you accidently brought any magnetic items inside. Basically if there's anyone in the machine at that time it wouldn't be pretty. There was an accident a few years ago involving a child in the MRI and a fire extinguisher in NY and that resulted in a fatality.

I think there's some sonuvabitch hacking my computer now cos the damn thing keeps restarting for no apparent reason. So I shall keep this thing short before iit restarts again.

RDOC #33
Last week was Halloween week. Interesting to see the ang mo's version of hungry ghost festival, and how they celebrate it... Basically it an excuse to just have another party and dress up in as outrageous a costume as possible. People were actually walking around and going for class in costume that day, which proved to be quite entertaining..

As usual, the SSA organised their own little party as well to commemorate the occasion. Unfortunately it was a day late and all the people who dressed up and walked around the street on the way to the party got suaned by the americans. Still, there were a few interesting and pretty creative costumes at the party; I just went in a nice, bright colourful shirt and called myself hawiian man. At the very least it was a good chance to get together, and now I also know where to actually get costumes...

Anyway, after that, life as usual goes on and on, work, sleep, frag, work, sleep, frag.....
I've volunteered for tech day this weekend. It's this event where high school students come and tour the campus and we try to "sell" UMICH to them. It should be an interesting experience to meet people and get a better feel of the place.

One more thing.. I finally decided to get my friendster account working and put some interesting stuff there. If you've got an account there add me to your list pls. Thanks