Monthly Archives: April 2004

Lighten Up

There was an interesting article in today’s New York Times entitled New Lesson for College Students: Lighten Up. I’d recommend reading it, especially if you are one of the overworked college students it talked about (like myself sometimes).

It comes at an interesting time as I get to register for Fall classes on Thursday. I’m having a tough time deciding exactly how much I want to/can handle.

For sure, I’m taking:

  • Phys 4001 — Analytical Mechanics — 4 cr.
  • Phys 4051 — Methods of Experimental Physics — 5 cr.
  • Math 5615H — Honors Analysis — 4 cr.
  • Mus 3480 — Marching Band — 1 cr.

This puts me at 14 credits, including Marching Band which we know is infinitely more work. Now I can’t decide on my last course. I’m considering

  • Chem 2312 — Honors Organic Lab — 5 cr, and 20 hours/week of work
  • Math 5385 — Computational Algebraic Geometry — 4 cr.
  • BioC 3021 — Biochemistry—3 cr.
  • EngL ???? — English Literature (anything)

Each of those classes would put me on my way towards graduating or would satisfy a premed requirement.

Alternative, I could take a “fun” class:

  • Dnce 1321 — Ballroom Dance — 1 cr.
  • PE 1032 — Badminton — 1 cr.
  • PE 1036 — Racquetball — 1 cr.
  • PE 1048 — Bowling — 1 cr.

U looks to scrap dorm voice mail

A few weeks ago all resident hall tenants were allowed to participate in a survey regarding features to be added/removed to the standard room rate. The ones on the survey this year were Newspapers, Cable TV, and Voicemail. Personally, I voted for the addition of free Newspapers and the retention of our voicemail program despite it’s cost. I voted against Cable TV since there’s cable in the lounge already and I don’t have the desire to watch.

The results came back in today’s Minnesota Daily:

Are you willing to have no more than $10 per semester added to your room/apartment rate to have three newspapers (USA Today, Star Tribune, St. Paul Pioneer Press) available to you Monday-Friday in your residence hall/apartment?
Results show number of votes/percentage of votes
Yes: 1090/53.99%
No: 925/45.81%
N/A: 4/0.2%

Are you willing to pay approximately $80 per semester for cable TV in your residence hall room/apartment?
Yes: 1177/58.3%
No: 841/41.65%
N/A: 1/0.05%

The Minnesota Daily: U looks to scrap dorm voice mail

While nothing really surprises me, it saddens me that more people would rather spend $80 a semester for cable tv than $10 a semester for THREE free newspapers (in addition to the Minnesota Daily) every day.

Umm, hello. Free papers are way cool.

My Desk

I think you can tell a lot about a person based upon how they keep up their life. So in case you were wondering about me, here’s a picture of my current desk:

My Messy Desk

Note that it’s not the cleanest, but at least there aren’t piles everywhere. Notable items include:

  • Stooge paddle
  • Plant—obtained for $5 from Target… mostly dead now
  • Goldy Marching Band Bobblehead
  • Middlebrook Hall Study Buck—they caught me studying!
  • iPod—30gb
  • Cell Phone—that’s why I never have it if you were to call
  • Post-it Notes—how could I live without?

Congratulations Women’s Hoops

What a season it has been. UConn played an excellent game and definitely deserved to win. It’s sad for me to see the season come to an end. Sorry to the band members stuck in New Orleans… Gary, I guess you have something to be happy about.

I liked the photo that Gophersports.com put up:

In case you were wondering, the picture that would have been on the website if they won was

Bye Lindsay Whalen. You’ll certainly be missed. Hopefully the team can pickup where they left off this year with another fantastic season next year.

The Rasterbator

I ran into a link to The Rasterbator a month or two ago and was curious as to how it’d turn out. Essentially it takes an image file you submit and creates a rasterized version of it, essentially a picture with only a white background and black circles of various diameter on a set grid. The “darker” the the part of the image, the larger diameter the black circle is.

I, of course, choose to do a portrait of myself [link dead], namely one that I took while in El Paso for the Sun Bowl.

The software on the site allowed me to crop the part of the image I wanted and then let me choose how many sheet of paper to print it on. I choose 2×2 since my printer was running out of toner.

It then processes your image and returns a pdf file of the output. In case you are curious, here’s the pdf output [link dead].

So I printed it and hung it on the wall. The final result:

A rasterized picture of myself hanging on the wall.

I decided it looked pretty good, so I made one of Dave too:

Rasterized photo of Dave.

UThink

UThink: Blogs at the University Libraries is a new project by the University of Minnesota to offer unlimited free blogs to all staff/students/faculty. The system is easy to configure and get started—just login with your x500 and give them a title/tagline for your blog. For example, I got one setup in under 5 minutes or so.

It’s easy to add new posts (just the standard MovableType interface), but perhaps not so obvious if you have never used it before. They do an okay job trying to offer some links to tutorials/help sites, but there’s no direct hand-holding along the way.

I find it relieving (and quite interesting) that they left all the power-user features of MT (like being able to customize all of your pages with templates) in place. However, the beginning user is likely to get confused and will have a tough time fixing any mistakes if they go messing around.

I found the lack of installed plugins depressing, especially since the individual user will have no power to install “personal” plugins for themselves. At a bare minimum, I’d recommend installing MT Textile which significantly speeds up the time it takes to write, and allows beginning users to easily add links and such.

I think it will be interesting to see how adoption goes, especially since it looks like they will be providing each user ample space (they assumed 180mb per user or something like that per 3 years). It also has the benefit of no ads and quick loading times. The only detractor is their obligatory legal statement on the bottom of every page:

The views and opinions expressed in this page are strictly those of the page author.
The contents of this page have not been reviewed or approved by the University of Minnesota.

However, that is easily circumvented with a little bit of css, namely by adding the following to the styles-site.css template.

h5{ display:none; }

Another feature that many people (namely those coming from blogging “communities” like Xanga and LiveJournal) will miss is the ability to “subscribe” to other people’s posts and quickly view new entries. Albeit, this problem is easily survived with RSS readers (like the excellent Net News Wire), I don’t think enough of the users will understand such a concept.

QotD: Questions of the Day?

Question: Is this question of the day format too geeky for me to continue using?

My answer, I think it’s mostly just an easy excuse for me to have content without coming up with anything original.

I don’t really understand the target audience of my blog (friends from/high school college). So what do you want to see here. As an aside, I added the photos section. There’s some miscellaneous pictures there from past trips and stuff this year. I’m not really thrilled with the layout, but I don’t have time as of yet to customize it.

Would y’all be interested in a “photoblog” of sorts, like Proving that a picture isn’t worth 1000 words?

So the question really is this: what do you want to be here?

Final Four

As I’m sure you’ve heard a million times already, the Lady Gopher’s Basketball Team is headed to the Final Four. I won’t be going in the band (since I’m not in WAB). The game is in New Orleans, and they are staying at a $200/night hotel, so it should be a pretty sweet time.

The big game is Sunday, I hope y’all watch. They are showing the game at William’s Arena (for free) if you are interested. It sounds like they might get a band together and play during the commercials and such.