RA Status

Our RA, Bill, has a little pinwheel basically outside of his room that he changes to let us know where he is. It says things like "Food," "Working out," "Zombie Lounge," "Here," "Out," and "12 O'Clock." He went home for the past two days and somebody took the label that said "Food," turned it backwards, wrote "Beast-Love" on it and put the arrow to that.

Peace out.

The Workers

I wonder a lot about the people that do the jobs that no one wants whenever I happen to run into them. Whenever I get on a bus, I wonder what kind of life the bus driver has. When I was in Wildwood I noticed something of the same sort, I think, maybe a Tram Car driver or something like that.

In Atherton, there's an older guy janitor that I often wonder about. He reminds me a little bit of the Brooks character from The Shawshank Redemption, except this guy is a little bit shorter, a little less frail, and has a foreign accent. I don't really know why I pick to wonder about these kind of workers over so many others. I guess it's because they work the jobs that people always seem to threaten you with - "What, you wanna grow up to mop floors?" I wonder how he grew up and I wonder if he sees it the same way. I wonder if he has a wife and kids and if this work was enough to give them what they needed in that sense. I wonder where his parents are and what they thought of it. I wonder if they know all the other things he does and is good at and I wonder if they're proud of him. They should be, I think. When there's seven feet of snow it's people like him that stay for twenty hours to put the place back together and I'm sure through the week he sees these walls more than he sees his wife and I think there's a lot to be said for what he does and his ability to stick with it. I don't know if I'd be able to.

Peace out.

The Bigler Rinks

If you go out the back of my dorm, turn right on the sidewalk, left up Shortlidge Road, right on Pollock and then left up Bigler, you'll get to a bunch of athletic fields and the Bigler Rinks, which is where we played all of our roller hockey games.

So I think the most ridiculously notable thing about the Bigler Rinks was the parking situation. They were actually in a fairly inconvenient spot for like 80% of the people that played, and considering how much stuff you have to bring with you to play hockey, that's kind of a problem. Specifically if you are a goalie. So if you were across the street from the rink complex and walked into it, first you'd cross a regular old sidewalk like they have all over campus. Then there's a few yards of grass with maybe a tree or two, and a couple yards of it are paved. After this couple yard strip is a tall fence, maybe twelve feet. After that, everything is paved. There are two rinks side by side inside that, set about about twenty feet from the fence. There's a shack on the right and a referee's post in the middle, and ofter there are construction vehicles inside, and a dirt pile on the right for some reason we can't really figure out. In either case, posted on the fence is a sign that says NO PARKING BEYOND THIS POINT. So you are actually allowed to park on the grass outside the fence and the little strip of pavement leading into the rinks, but not in the large swath of pavement inside the rink area where only hockey players go.

However, people still park there regularly. They did it like all season. And basically every other time someone would do it, the parking fairy would come around and start writing tickets. Every time this happened, someone on the bench would yell, "Yo, dude, you're getting a ticket," at which point the person would scream obscenities and then hassle the ticket fairy. Then they would try to stop the game, which sometimes happened and sometimes did not, so that they could go move their car. Sometimes they got a ticket, sometimes not. Sometimes they were threatened to have their car towed, but I don't think this ever happened. Whenever they did move their car so as to not recieve a ticket, they'd have to take it a way away before they could come back which seriously screwed up their playing. Alternatively, they would have a friend with shoes on who just came to watch the game move their car for them, which I'm sure their friends all loved?

At the back end of the Bigler Rinks was a fence, then a little strip of land, then another fence, and then a whole lot of construction areas. On the right of the rink was a raised mulch bed, which we also couldn't figure out, and then a fence and more construction. It really sucked to hit the ball into just about any of these places. If you hit it past the second construction fence, it was basically gone forever. If you hit it past the first fence you'd have to wait until you could get someone with shoes to get it for you. Sometimes you would just declare it not worth it and go for it later.

The rinks themselves were pretty terrible. The surface was very torn up and ripped and just absolutely destroyed your wheels. Like, it was probably as bad as rollerskating on gravel. Plus they rinks were a beach. There was just sand and dust everywhere, and if you've ever skated on anything like that, you know how dangerous and scary it is to come into a turn over sand at full speed knowing that no matter what, something is about to go very wrong. There were also holes in the board where kids sticks would get stuck regularly. Fortunately no one ever impaled themselves on their stick in the process, although I'm sure it's happened or is going to happen sometime. The ball bounced everywhere because of the tears in the surface which was really annoying, but it goes both ways I guess. The boards were shaky and the doors didn't close all the way about 90% of the time.

There were also holes in the nets which made for a number of questionable referring decisions across the board, but oh well, it happens. Nick, our goalie, asked at the end of the season why no one would just invest in a nice net or two for the two goals we had so that there wouldn't be any question anymore, and Tim told him it was because they were going to tear down the rinks next year to make a parking lot for a new medical center. But maybe they would build us new ones somewhere.

Peace out.

Golden, Piaget, and Gauss

In the Stained Glass show we did this year, our xylophone player (Jason) had to hit a crotale and then put it into a tupperware container of water to make the pitch bend in the middle of Cathedrals, the second number. Early in the season, people joked about putting live fish into his water. The week before Dayton, Laura and Brandon actually DID put fish into his water. We all thought it was really funny and we laughed for a while, but then Brooke started to worry that the fish would die. First of all, there were three of them in that little tupperware container and they weren't getting any new oxygen in that water. She started looking around for a straw, but never found one. I started to feel really bad for the poor fish too, so I tried to find something as well. I ended up basically deconstructing one of my mechanical pencils and just blowing air through that from time to time. I'm pretty sure everyone who noticed, once again, thought that I was crazy.

This was the weekend of the Keith Urban concert, so practiced ended early, something like 3PM, so that the battery could get ready and practice and whatnot. The pit was going to go bowling with whatever instructors were free, and Brooke convinced me to take care of the fish somehow. So we went to Wal*Mart, which isn't far from the bowling alley, and got a tank with a bubbler and light and cover and bought some food, too. I think she paid for most of it but I think I chipped in for some part of it... Anyway. We took the fish to bowling and fed them a little bit and we got a straw while we were there to give them some air.

I took them home that night and put them in the tank. We had gotten some gravel to decorate their tank with, too, so I put that in there. I remember I was really unsure of what I was doing and it took me a while to get everything all sorted out, thanks in part to the fact that the nearest source of water from me is like 66 steps away. But eventually I got everything sorted out, their air working and the light working and the gravel in place and I think I even got them a little decoration that night from Kenny down the hall, fed them again and went to sleep.

When I woke up the next morning I remember the three of them were all very very still and I was afraid they had all died and just frozen in position, but then I tapped their tank once and they all scattered. I fed them again before I went to drumline. When I came home, the largest and most gold-colored of them was laying on his side on the bottom of the tank, dead. I didn't know what had happened... I used tap water but I purified it and they'd only been in there a day and I introduced them to the water slowly and they made it through the night and I fed them and I just didn't really get it. I remember it was rainy that Sunday when I got back from drumline, and I put him on a napkin and took him to one of the pretty courtyards in front of Atherton and dug a hole for him with a flat grey rock I found there in front of a tree and looked at him one last time, closed my eyes and folded him up and tried to cover him in his spot as nicely as I could. It was a very sad time for me actually.

After that, we named the fish. Gina and I were talking and we decided to name the small silver one Piaget and the middle-sized orange/white/black one Gauss, after the famous academics. We named the largest one Golden after his color, and the fact that we were very sad about his death and there is a Fallout Boy song with the same name that is appropriately sad. Anyway. Piaget and Gauss were doing well that first week from everything I could put together. I remember telling Gina a bunch of times that Gauss and Piaget were swimming happily and I was happy that they were doing well.

Then, I think on Wednesday after I came back from class, I saw that Piaget was swimming funnily. He was on his side a lot and seemed to have a lot of trouble going to higher elevations in the water. Sometimes when he would swim he would do corkscrews through the water. I looked up what was wrong with him and found out it was his air bladder of course, and tried to find out how to fix it. You're supposed to slowly lift them up and down in the water to try to sort out whatever is wrong with their balancing and adjusting mechanisms. I tried to use a spoon to do this a couple of times, but Piaget kind of resisted letting the spoon lay beneath him, so I couldn't really do that. I noticed, throughout the night, though, that Gauss kept getting underneath Piaget and pushing him to the top and then letting him fall back, like he knew that was what he needed to do to fix him. It was so adorable. That's when I decided that Gauss was the best fish ever. I tried to take a video of Gauss doing this but I could never get it at the right moment.

I had to go to hockey that day and I was leaving for Dayton the next day and I had to pack and eat dinner and I remember I was out of the room a lot and I was sad that I couldn't be there to try to take care of Piaget. I did just about everything I could for him. I had some room temperature pure water laying around, I believe, so I put that in there, and I fed him and I purified the water again just a little bit and I tried to lift him up and down. I don't think there was much else that I could do. I was afraid that he would die when I was out of the room and I'd feel guilty for not being there or something like that. He was alive when I came back from hockey, and from dinner, and throughout packing, and he was there that night until 1AM or so at least. I remember he was laying on the gravel in his tank when I said went to bed and I got one last look at him knowing it might be the last time I saw him alive. When I woke up the next morning he was laying dead on his side in a different spot, and I buried him in the same manner right next to Golden.

Gauss is the only fishy left. He seems to be doing fine. He is a very good boy and he was wonderful to Piaget when he was sick and I'm glad that I saved him. Oh, I should say, we found out later that Brandon and Laura bought the three of them as feeder fish for bigger fish that Brandon had. So I'm glad I saved at least Gauss.

There is a chance Gauss is a girl. To be determined, I suppose.

Peace out.

Pants

When you play hockey, you have to wear skates and shin pads, and to accomodate that, most kids wear a certain type of pants called hockey pants. You could wear other stuff, I suppose, but you don't want to fall and rip your other nice pants, plus they're usually way too hot. Hockey pants are usually pretty baggy and have pretty crazy designs on them. They're a really strange swooshy material that reminds me to some extent of what most tarps are made of, and then have some areas that have holes in it to let lots of air through like basketball shorts. Their color schemes are usually pretty wild, common ones including black/grey/red and white/yellow/blue, usually with lots of sharp, bold lines.

So the first time I went to hockey, I went to dinner right afterward and I didn't change my pants. I swear to god, everyone that noticed that I existed noticed the pants I was wearing and judged me on it. Sometime near the end of dinner, Fin came up to me and was like, "Jeff? Is that you? I thought I saw you earlier but I was like, Jeff would never wear those pants." The people I was sitting with also made fun of me for it, although I forget who they were that night. I remember walking out of the cafeteria and looking at people's eyes and seeing so many of them look down to my hockey pants and just feeling very embarrassed. I was wearing a white sport shirt, I think, so it shouldnt' have looked that out of place, but I suppose it was. From the on, I would always bring my jeans to the game or change before I went to dinner.

I rode my bike to and from the games, carrying my hockey bag and my stick with me. I think a lot of people must have thought I was a total crazyface riding around like that. Even the kids on my team said something about it. It really was the best way to get there though. Oh well.

One time after a long time playing - it was the day before the seasons started, actually, and we just had a pickup game that went from four until about eight and we played in the snow for two hours - I tried to skate to Redifer afterwards for some food. My skate basically broke on the way, so I ended up walking after a certain point in Pollock, I think. I remember walking into Redifer, I could feel people looking at me and I think I heard some people say "Uh, check out the kid with the hockey stick - ???" I think I was wearing my hockey pants, too. I think sometimes I don't understand how crazy the things I do seem to other people. I swear they all make sense to me.

Peace out.

MATH 311W

My class at 9:05AM on M/W/F was 311W, taught by Gary Mullen in (I think) 213 Osmond.

I can't describe how awesome this class was. This is going to be a terrible entry compared to all the rest, I'm just warning you in advance.

Mullen was an EXCELLENT teacher. I don't really know how else to put it. He's taught that class for years and years, so he knows exactly what he wants to say in every lecture. He always is extremely prepared and has lots of examples worked out ahead of time and has all of his notes good to go for every class and never gets caught flatfooted up at the board unable to prove something or work something out. He spoke loudly and clearly and varied his tone and cursed sometimes to keep you interested.

One time we were going over codes. Basically, you have some strings of numbers that are codewords. So we'll say our codewards of 000, 001, 010, and 100. If someone tries to send me a message and I get something other than those codewords I just listed, then something has gone wrong and we have to find a way to find out what has gone wrong. When Dr. Mullen was talking about this, he introduced the codewords and then said, "And someone sends us something and we get the message 110. And we look at it and we say, 'Well... oh, shit!' ". I suppose I just thought it was funny that a math teacher found a reason to say "Oh, shit!" in math class. He also did it in a very signature way... he has a really distinct voice that's kind of low but kind of not, and he often looks towards us but down at the same time and holds his arms kind of inward. It was a very funny experience overall, I wrote it down in my notebook.

I think the one thing that he could have done but didn't really have us do was make us work together in class. I think I have weird opinions about that... I remember I hated it in high school for the most part, but I know I wished he had made us work together in this class. I think it would have drilled the stuff into our heads right away instead of waiting till whenever we studied again, and it would have gotten the kids in the class to know each other better. But oh well. Some people think that's inefficient and a bad use of class time. S'alright.

The stuff we learned in this class was the basics of what's called discrete math, which is basically math that deals with integers. We learned about the division algorithm and a lot of things having to do with greatest common divisors and the Euclidean Method, then some stuff about modular arithmetic and congruence classes and inverses. Then we learned some stuff about functions but not too much, I forget what else was in that chapter. We also learned about encryption and stuff like that using Euler's Formula and the Phi function and such things, too, and we learned about permutations and order and sign, then we learned about groups. Then we learned about cosets and LaGrange's Theorem and subgroups and stuff and then finally about codes.

I think, after the first test, a lot of people got scared and left the class. I know a lot of people didn't come to class, and I have no idea how they did well. I mean, well, I suppose I could sort of understand since the book (Numbers, Groups, and Codes) was actually AWESOME, but it would be way harder to do well if you didn't come to class.

No one really talked to each other, or at least, if they did, I hardly knew about it. I usually showed up to class early and there was usually another kid in the class when I showed up there. I think I found out later that he transferred from Hazelton, but I might be making that up. We had a group project on primitive elements that we had to write a paper about, and we could work with people on that, but I didn't work with anyone because I never really felt inclined to ask or felt like I had an opportunity to ask. I kind of wanted to, but never felt like I could. I know other kids in the class worked together, and some of them just seemed to form groups natural, so I got the feeling that some of them knew each other perhaps from having math classes together before, but I was never sure.

Anyway, no one EVER talked in class, and never really before or after class until the last day. The kid that was always there really early was talking about the grade he needed to get a C, and other kids were talking about their test scores. One kid I think got a 100 on the first test and an 18 on the second, or something like that. There's a very good dresser who sits two seats behind me that said he memorized all the proofs for everything we'd done in class because that was how he killed himself on the second test. The girl in front of me, who I think was a cheerleader for CB West or South, said that she heard the 3rd exam wasn't as hard as the 2nd exam. There was a very soft spoken girl who sat beside me that gave me a pencil once and who borrowed my notes before class once. The kids talked about a "Squirrel Kid" in our class who always came in late and looked like a squirrel, but I had no idea who they were talking about. They talked about Dr. Mullen and what they liked and didn't like about him. They were actually a pretty funny crew and I was pretty sad I didn't strike up conversations before. I had thought about it but I was always afraid for some reason. I should stop that. The kid from Hazelton said that if he had to decode a code and he couldn't figure it out, he'd just write "G A R Y R U L E S" and hope for the best.

Peace out.

CMPSC 201

My 8AM class on M/W/F is CMPSC 201, which is basically programming in C++ but "for engineers" so we had to learn MATLAB toward the end of the course... that part was kind of scammy, we only did MATLAB for like three days and we didn't learn a whole ton, but anyway.

So the first day of the course, our teacher basically got right down to business even though it was 8AM and the first Monday morning of the new semester. The lecture hall was in this building called Kern in the northwest part of campus, which is as far as you can get from me, and it was probably freezing that day. It's not so bad to bike there, generally, takes about five minutes, but walking there after my wheel was broken was a piece of crap. Kern has a nice little snack shop and cafe and even some sort of restaurant on its ground floor, and the lecture hall was definitely one of the nicer ones on campus. It held probably a little over 300 people, had padded seats (although the writing boards were tiny), and had really good technology for white boards and projections and things like that.

So the first day, I didn't know what to expect with this teacher. She seemed alright, I guess. She's probably about 50 years old, has long blonde wavy/curly hair, glasses, spoke loudly and generally pretty clearly although she took her time typing things perfectly (she admits this all the time). She mentioned a few things during the lecture that I wasn't familiar with, including "Angel," and I remember I went up to her to ask her what it was after class explaining to her that I was a transfer this semester, and she told me what it was and where to go to find it. I forget if we had a lab after that class or not, but in either case I remember I got a 90 on my first lab because I didn't put my name on it, even though its impossible for them to get your lab and not be sure of whose it is.

Well anyway, I was looking at RateMyProfessor or whatever that site is when I got back. Most teachers have like a dozen or so comments if they have any at all. When I found my teacher, who I just call Suzi Q, I found that she had OVER TWO HUNDRED COMMENTS. Which usually means there is something very strange going on. So I clicked and read some of them, and they were full of just the most scathing, hateful, bitter reports on a teacher that I had ever seen, and I mean that without exaggeration. Some of the tamer reviews that I found included the following:

"With out a doubt, the worst teacher at Penn State. I would have rather taken a class from someone who speaks no english. Every time I had a question or problem [Suzi Q] was very un-willing to help. If you can avoid her classes, do so at all cost"

"If you want to relive the days of high school with teachers who hate their jobs and wreak havoc with their unprofessionalism, have [Q] as your teacher. She is the epitome of rudeness and is extremely unhelpful. If you made a mistake which was mostly her fault (i.e. Angel), prepare to be scolded when you visit her in her dungeoun lair. Worst ever!"

After reading those, all of a sudden I was like ((O_O)). But I still didn't think she was that bad, and there were some people who even seemed to like her or think she was okay somewhere in the mix, so I decided to just go with that.

So for a long time I didn't really have a problem with her. Then one day in class we were talking about what input would be needed if you used a program to find the area of a circle and how the radius being negative would be an error, and I asked if you could just tell the user that you would take the magnitude of their input and then find the area based on that. So the magnitude of -7 would be 7, so -7 would be a fine input. And she freaked out for a minute or two and I don't think really understood what I was asking and kids kept just shaking their heads and being like "Sorry man..." So after that I started to see why people didn't like her so much.

After that, I didn't have a problem with her for a while. I didn't do extremely well on my second exam, so I asked if I could see my ScanTron sheet to make sure nothing had gone wrong. I remember the day I asked to see her I was in a rush and I didn't have time to print out the answer sheet, so I put a copy of it on my Flash Drive and planned to ask her to print it out when I got there, or she could just look from the computer if she was going to hand grade it, or anything like that. I sat and waited outside her office in the basement of the IST building after looking for it for about 15 minutes, ended up waiting for her for a long while past when she said she would be there. She didn't say a word to me when she passed by me, knowing that I was there to see her. She didn't know my name and almost found the wrong kid's test. Then she found mine and told me to get out the answer sheet, and I gave her my flash drive and apologized for not having time to get to a printer, and she got very angry with me. I didn't really understand. To be honest I can't even remember her telling me to bring the answer key. And furthermore, what the hell, I already searched for her office for 15 minutes and sat waiting for 15 minutes, now you, my teacher, can lend me a hand for all of five seconds by putting the answer sheet I at least put on my flash drive on the screen for me. Angrily, she printed out the sheet, yelled at me when I almost put a mark on my ScanTron, and watched silently as I regraded my own test.

The "Angel" that I referred to earlier is the Course Management System at PSU. You can turn in homework and print out class notes and see your grades and such things on Angel. That's how we turn in our labs and projects and etc. for this class, which is why it's impossible for them to get a lab without knowing whose it is. You can title your submissions when you turn them in and attach a message if you'd like, so for instance you can title it "Lab 1" and attach the message "I don't think we learned proper commenting formats yet, please don't deduct until we have learned" and then attach your file for them. I usually make my titles and messages song to emo lyrics - Fallout Boy, Panic!, and Academy are favorites - but I don't know if they ever really read any of them. Anyway.

This last project we had in MATLAB had somewhat unclear directions for the last step. Myself and I believe a few others interpreted it as calling for one figure with three graphs on it, then another figure with three graphs on it. Then she sent out an email telling us that it should be a figure with four graphs on it: The first three graphs the same as before, the last graph combining the three from the second figure in the previous attempt. I had already turned in my first attempt, but they generally don't grade them until a day or so after the deadline, so I could turn it in again. So I turned it in and titled it, "Now that the directions have changed..." and attached my file. A few days later I got this in my inbox:

"The directions did NOT change. There was on point for you to use different line styles and legend unless you put different ones on same plot. Be careful of your attitude, it could cost you points!"

I think she sort of misinterpreted my tone. Maybe I should have used a smiley. In either case I'm expecting my next project to have the line "-5: Attitude" in the grading section. [I'm kidding about that last part. I think it'd be hilarious though]

I want to say more about this class but I'm kind of tired of talking about it.

I hated waking up for it. On Wednesdays you only had to go if you didn't complete the lab on your own, and I would always complete the lab on my own just so I wouldn't have to go because there's nothing I'd rather not be doing on Wednesday at 8AM than in Comp Sci doing a lab for Suzi Q. We had unannounced quizzes basically every Monday and sometimes other days, but you go to drop one every third of the semester. I think I lost one point on one of these the entire time, although I'm pretty sure I skipped two. I didn't really keep track though...

Overall the COURSE was good. I learned C++. I wrote a program to find primitive elements of prime numbers with it. However, the instruction was pretty terrible. It was kind of like the textbook, except with lots of typos and a terrible attitude. I really hated the quizzes more than anything else in class because they made you have to go. I wish I could have just gotten the labs and projects and the textbook and done it through the web. It should be a web course. I think that's my recommendation.

Peace out.