Today has been one big puddle of emotions, reactions and moods. This will be quite an adventure for my loyal readers, so either grab on to something stable or grab a pillow.
Lets start with yesterday at 4:30PM when I was enroute to UNCC and the first sign of weirdness occured. It was a perfectly nice day to be driving to UNCC, everything was on schedule and everything was ok with my day (can you not see the horror story plot building here?). I had visual contact with the campus from my position on highway 49 and was waiting at the last stop light before the campus entrance. As I slowed down for the stop my vehicle began a slight shaking and then decided to die all together as soon as it was at a full stop. Me being the incredibly bright person that I am tried to go from dead (switch in on posotion) to restarting the vehicle, this didn’t work as it only reactivated the electrical system. Once I discovered that the vehicle really wanted to be off for a second, I shut it down and then performed ignition again. Vehicle resumed as if nothing had gone wrong. I continued to campus, entered successfully and then notified both parents of the possible issue with my vehicle. I started that evening out already nervous about possible issues with my vehicle. I went to class (Western History and Culture: Masterpieces of Western Art) for 3 hours. I was bored out of my mind most of the time with Mr. Frakes’s analysis of the pieces we were looking at. One of the pieces we were looking at was the sculpture, “David”. While we were on this subject there was an image of “David” on the projector. I counted five seperate times that Mr. Frakes pointed to David’s penis. I would consider this abnormal behavior for an art instructor. Eventually time for the course was up. I was in a non-excited but not depressed mood as I exited the class. I returned to my vehicle not sure what to expect: perfect startup, perfect run all the way home (I was going at a fairly rapid pace, so it was a run for the vehicle).
My evening didn’t conclude there, I arrived home and began just generally staring into space because I felt like it. At some point Chris requested a call, I made the call and then noticed that I had Logic homework to do. At some point the Logic homework became a group effort as I started reading the questions out loud. Chris is a very logical person and can follow the patterns without any formal logic instruction. I learned 2 things from the experience: 1. Logic is more fun with a partner, 2. Chris hates logic, even though he is great at it. The evening ended a few hours after the homework was finished when I became tired and Chris became non-talkative.
Today began at 10:00AM for me. I awake to an alarm sounding and my television activating. Once I was awake I ate breakfast, began getting dressed and prepared myself for the day. About the time I was ready to leave I heard my car starting and moving out of the driveway, my father decided to steal my car! My father returned about 15 minutes later, but instead of wasting time yelling at him I decided to not waste time conveying messages to the deaf, ignorant, yankee ears. I proceded on to UNCC, vehicle operated normally with the exception of an unusual smell when I parked.
The first order on the agenda of the day was the Psychology study at 11:30. I was on time for the study, amazingly. There were only 2 participants in the session I attended. The study was survey based, a 50 item survey about a stressful event. The event I used was me taking the Microsoft 70-220 certification exam, the only exam that I failed. The study coordinator was pretty cute, she was also very nice and made an attempt to make study participants feel comfortable. The only thing I have to complain about with her is the way she handled debriefing. Debriefing consisted of a 1″ x 8.5″ piece of paper, for this study it was ok, but for something more in depth i would expect an actual defriefing session before being released.
Once the wonderful little study was over with I hauled myself to the other end of the quadrant of the campus to McEniry for Deductive Logic. We reviewed stuff, we turned in homework, we reviewed some more, we heard jokes about Mr. Dr. Presler, we were dismissed. Physics was a little odd today, I took my new seat today beside Ryan. The Clickers now work with the devices (w00000t!). One of the odd things of the class was related to my new placement in the room. I could see better and it was nice to actually not be right in front of Dr. Naeini, but the back-of-the-room-disturbance-people were right behind me. Some people shouldn’t even attend class, they should just stay in their happy little worlds of their percieved perfections and not attmept to interact with people who are different than them. Dr. Naeini is a perfectly nice guy, but for some reason a lot of students feel the need to insult him, disrupt his class and constantly giggle (im thinking the 2 rows behind my seat may actually be the pot-smoking group). The physics class itself went well, there was some knowledge obtained, but towards the end i found myself not able to follow what Dr. Naeini was doing and gave up on the rest of my notes for the day. Once physics concluded I went out of Burson and headed toward Barnard like I always do. I got caught in a cloud of smoke as many students exiting the building began to “light up” for their post-class smoke. I don’t know that I have ever been as disgusted with smokers as I was today (combination of circumstance and mood I suppose).
I manged to breath long enough to make my way to the clear air of Barnard Computer Commons and took care of neccesary (one day i need to learn to spell that word) administrative issues, such as entering grades from my Logic class as well as entering the homework for the course. After those issues were out of the way I handled my standard email stuff on my 3 normal domains for mail checking during the day – curtis.kularski.net, uncc.edu and now gmail.com. Two of my accounts (uncc and g) are by webmail only, I am not finding this to be horribly annoying because it means i have to check 3 seperate webmail servers instead of just having CMK4’s IMail installation retrieve it at logon. After I finished checking email I spent a few minutes looking at GITI from a truely end-user perspective and found a lot of things that needed to be done to it. There is such a huge difference in using GITI at home where I can call the source code at a moments notice and being on-campus where I can’t easily make code changes on a whim. Maybe this is what makes GITI so problematic, I edit without much thought. I found a bug today in my new navigation bar for Education module components, if I submit a form I am taken to my scripts folder, and the links attempt to call the files based on that, this doesn’t work as the files it needs are in the modules folder, not the scripts folder. This should be a simple fix though.
When the time arrived for me to leave Barnard I proceded on to my English 1102 course. We recieved back our drafts of our papers today. I have been told I did better than most people, even though Betsy wrote about the same amount on my paper as I did. The woman worries me sometimes. I will be revising the paper over the weekend and preparing draft #3 for Monday and then Tuesday I will work on the final copy for Wednesday’s class. We were told to exchange copies of draft #2 with people around us for our peer review stuff. I have 2 decent papers I will be reviewing. I pray for the mental stability of the two unfortunate souls who have ended up with my paper. I am way too technical in it and it is enough to make anyone’s head spin. English was dismissed about 20 minutes early. I came home, ate dinner and have pretty much been sitting here since I got home. I am thinking about working on GITI at least some tonight.
Next week I have a tests in Logic and Abnormal Psyc. The week after I have tests in Physics, and WH&C:MOWA. Anyone who interacts with me should take this as fair warning.
As requested, I am posting GITI screen shots for public viewing. Once they are ready they will be at http://curtis.kularski.net/GITI/v1 for current version (stable) and http://curtis.kularski.net/GITI/v2 for the development project. Development is highly volitile and is totally theoretical at this point.
Current Music: Leann Rimes – Life Goes On (mp3, local\e:\my_music)
In the Queue: Eiffel 65 – Now is Foreever; Europe – Final Countdown
No witty conclusion, just me. Bye Yall!