Over the past few days I’ve had a few new experiences, most of them negative, and a few repeated experiences, most of them also negative.  I have also lost a pair of pants, also negative.  Let me dive into some of the less than pleasant tales.

Over the weekend, I performed inadequate in my relationships with others.  I was distant at times and occasionally found the status quo to be acceptable.  A fair number of people would have also agreed, or at least argued, that the status quo was acceptable but logically I should have realized this was not the case.  It was not logical of me to permit the situation to stay as is, despite any perceived convenience for me.  Thinking back, I believe I made the mistake of thinking too many steps ahead, instead of where I needed to put my foot next.  I will have to improve in this area.

Additionally, I provided insufficient gifts.  As a gift giver, I know that what I give is never going to be the best idea ever since I will always apply my own “spin” on the token or item.  What I failed to take into account this season was the comparison factor.  In any other season, my tokens would have likely been much more sufficient.  This season is different from others, and I should have remembered that I needed to respond accordingly.  I will provide an example for clarity: If you present 12 golden coins, it seems like a pretty nice deal. That is the case until another person presents 25 gold coins.  If the 25 gold coins were never presented the 12 you had would have been super, but after 25 have been passed on the table, the comparison to others makes your offering much smaller than you intended it to be.  Better luck next time I guess.

Saturday night I attended an indoor barbecue-style event.  I do not believe I have attended similar events during my tenure at RPI or during the course of the current campaign.  This event confirmed my belief that I am socially distant from others and overall an undesirable social asset.  I’m not sure if this is a good thing or a bad thing, but my intuition is telling me that I would be much better off if I was located within 1.5 IQR here and not so far off course in outlier territory.  As a result of this, my engagement (though I didn’t engage much) ended early.

After departing the BBQ event, I went to get ice cream.  Somehow, the battery in my car decided that it was going to die/not do it’s job.  This creates quite the predicament for me.  A dead battery is not something I can easily solve on my own, like a flat tire or dislocated shoulder.  Asking for assistance from others is tough for me, because I dislike being indebted to another person for an undefined period of time.  Luckily, Ms. Boudreau was able to telephone Mr. Emala on her mobile and he and Mr. Kouttron were able to provide the required electricity to get my car started again.  I backed my car into my spot in front of BARH and it hasn’t been able to start since.  I hope to resolve this “tomorrow”.

Backing up a few hours, I’d like to resume discussion on the social.  For a while I’ve know that I am usually classified as socially awkward, which hasn’t bothered me much.  I guess I’ve always found awkward and acceptable not to be mutually exclusive, but maybe the analysis yielding that result is wrong.  I have always recognized that my guest is socially more desirable than myself, so I kind of write it off when a group joking doesn’t permit her to leave while I attempt to exit.  All in good spirit.

I am also poor at “shooting the breeze” because this just sounds like a dumb idea.  Shooting at wind is almost always a waste of bullets, and I find conversations of the sort to go the same way.   Its not that I don’t like to talk to people, its that I have trouble generating appropriate topics for discussion.  Like most, when I have trouble generating appropriate topics for discussion I talk about the things around me.  Unlike most, I could spend a measurable quantity of time talking about someone’s choice of stance, sitting pose, dress, etc.. none of which really go over well in a “hey, how about this weather” kind of way.

I am unsure how to proceed, but will continue to explore a few options. One of those options is not proceeding at all.

I was disappointed to loose another pair of pants.  Somehow I had worn down the right knee area to a critical level.  By the time I had noticed the damage and sown up the hole, the structurally integrity of the fabric had been lost and I was unable to stop the hole’s growth.  My pant rotation will be off until I can find a suitable replacement.

Good night moon.

So I’m here, worried about where I’m going to be in 8 months after I graduate from RPI.  My typical approach might be to model my efforts after successful people I know who’ve graduate at RPI.  Let me think, I know of 3 people who’ve graduated and departed from RPI with similar degrees… of which 1 is fully employed, probably the person I have the least contact with as well.  I know plenty of people who’ve ‘extended’ their stays at the institute, be it to seek additional degrees or higher degrees, but I don’t know if that’s for me.  I think I’d rather be working, as I have yet to see an MS/PhD program interesting to me.

As such, I find myself updating something that looks like a resume and refreshing the list of cool and exciting projects I work on.  This ‘fair’ doesn’t look too promising.  I reviewed the list of companies in attendance and none of them particularly leaped out at me as a great place to work.  I’ve been consistently disappointed by RPI’s inability to get companies that interest me to come to campus.  Microsoft was here 2 years ago I think but they haven’t been back.  I’ve seen nothing from any other company that I recognize as a driving force on the web (sad face).  I don’t know who’s problem it is here at RPI.  Maybe this school isn’t just good enough, maybe the CS department is misguided in their curriculum, or maybe the people who run these fairs don’t knock on the right doors… like I said, I don’t know.

Things were always much easier when I always new the mission at hand and, almost as important, that another mission was always in the pipeline.  I might have taken for granted the fact that finishing earlier always meant I could jump quicker onto something new without having to wait around.  While the hours may have been grueling and the pay left something to be desired it was steady work, something that seems harder to find today.

But I can’t forget about the goings on of present.  Someone’s got to remember that indeed things need to get done for us to continue making progress.  Sometimes I wish progress left a more positive aftertaste in my mouth.  It seems 2009 has been a year where progress hasn’t flavored nearly as well as the past.  My taste buds have been burnt by indiscretions of others, my tongue distained with failure, and putrefied with poor communication.  What else is one to do?  I guess I should have employed some  strategic mouth wash early (and often) but it went against my belief in facilitating others happiness.  Now I’m left with what?  I guess I have left than I started, but that usually implies a large loss when I didn’t start out with very much at all.  I guess I’m left to build it up and see what happens.

Good night moon.

We have a rotary in South Hadley and its a pretty fun one to drive on.  Unlike most other rotaries, the traffic on our rotary doesn’t always have the right of way.  In one location, the traffic entering the rotary (coming off the bridge) is given preference and rotary traffic is asked to yield.  The sign that prompts people to yield isn’t placed perfectly, and sometimes people blow right by it thinking the sign used to be pointed at the bridge and got twisted… or they just don’t bother reading signs or listening to them.  What’s funny is when I’m yielding (aka stopped) and waiting for a gap in the bridge traffic, sometimes people coming off the bridge stop for me.  Usually I flash my high beams to confuse them in an attempt to encourage them to move along.

I also went to a beach or two whilst on “Cape Cod.”  South Hadley does not have any beaches that I am aware of for me to compare them to, but we do have a canal.

More often then not I find myself faced with, what appear to be, loose-loose situations where I can’t see very positive outcome being made regardless of what I choose.  As part of my life long attempts to avoid bad things, I frequently wonder if maybe I can just abstain from making a decision or weighing in on the subject.  Sometimes this technique works well, if there are 3 people choosing where to eat the other 2 may come to a conclusion before I need to chime in (though I would have trouble seeing meal consumption as a loose-loose type of thing).  Sometimes this technique provides less than desirable results, specifically when you’re the only person who can or needs to make a decision.  When I’m pretty sure that I’m going to loose. I’d prefer to loose by as little as possible; a calculation that sometimes hard to make on the fly.

After watching shows like ‘Defying Gravity’ I think to myself hrm, maybe I should become an astronaut…. where astronaut is a euphemism for person who works with physical things.  As a mostly software guy, I’m sometimes disappointed by how much of what I do only exists on a screen.  (Being in TV production doesn’t help much either).  If all of a sudden the worlds displays (CRT, LCD, LED, etc) magically died I would be out of luck.  I’ve always enjoyed how software is a very low-entry field… I don’t need to have my own huge space ship to do things…. but sometimes I wish my results were further reaching or involved something I could pass around and show people.  As a civil engineer, its pretty easy to see something my dad does… it probably involves lots of noise and digging.  As a programmer the extend of my resources might include a updated computer or access to someone else terminal… not nearly as inspiring as a bulldozer.

I have decided that my family’s Comcast bill is too expensive.  They offered us a promotion last summer to bundle our services and it worked out to a cost little above $100 a month.  This was a pretty good savings over the individual services, including this crazy long distance/local calling plan my mom had setup years ago.  After a few of the promotions have expired and the cost has nearly doubled… the main problem being that TV alone is running us close to $90 + fees.  Personally, I don’t feel like I’m getting my $90 worth of TV each month.  The internet (which I use far more than the TV) is much cheaper.  If the prices reversed, it might make more sense… because I’m not opposed to paying based on usage.  I understand that I can reduce the cost by reducing the channels, but adding removing available channels is a not a trivial thing.

Unfortunately like many others, we don’t have a viable competitor we can consider switching our service to.  Technically we could get a dish, but their “local channels” are really only “local channels large enough for us to care about” which excludes Channel 15 & 12, as well as the new Fox 6 [though Fox 6 has yet to prove its worth to me].  If DirectTV or the Dish Network carried Channel 15 and we could hide a dish behind the house I would look into switching… unfortunately that’s not an option.

Verizon Fios looks like someday they will bundle everything for us, and deliver it over delicious fiber cables, however they aren’t in my neighborhood and I haven’t heard anything about them in the area.  Someone needs to do what Vonage did for telephone service for the TV.  Ignoring some technical issues, I wouldn’t mind a box behind each TV that took in the internet and output channels for me to watch.  Yes, there are websites like Hulu that can enable me to rig up something like that… but it doesn’t beat live TV and the concept of channel surfing to find whats on.  Surfing a TV guide or listing of available shows just doesn’t present the same experience.

Also on the frustration list is Amazon, and their lackluster shipping services. While I don’t expect them to be a Newegg or anything like that, I expect that they’ll ship my stuff in a reasonable time… and when I pay them more for shipping I’d appreciate if they considered using that money to increase the shipping service.  Usually when I buy off Amazon I just use the “Free Super Savers Shipping” service because I’m in no rush to get my order and if they get it out the door within the week I’ll be fine with its arrival within 2 weeks of ordering it.  Last week (July 21) I placed an order on Amazon.  I got to the checkout process and decided to upgrade from the “Free Super Savers Shipping” to the “Standard Shipping” in addition to “Ship my order in as many boxes as you need to get it here fast”… at least that’s what the option meant.  My goal was to get these items to arrive within a week so logically, I paid for the slightly better shipping… the only paid service that wasn’t crazy like 2-day shipping.  Unfortunately I think that money I paid for shipping went into someone else’s pockets.. not the person who actually moves my package to me.

As it stands now, both items were shipped mailed via the USPS.  Now I don’t dislike the USPS… but I use them for things like letters, selling textbooks, etc… not items that I’m expecting any super outstanding delivery with.  One item “Left Seller Facility” on Wednesday July 22 at which point the it was driven around  the middle of nowhere until Monday when the USPS stated”Electronic Data recieved” which is where it stands right now.  I don’t even know if the USPS has the actual package… but at least they know about it!  The other one left a “seller facility” on Saturday, and the USPS acknowledged yesterday that it had electronic data on it.  Neither of them show their locations in the nation’s postal network, and neither of them show any sign of arriving today.  I would have really liked it if when I paid Amazon extra they would have given the package to someone in a reasonable period of time… and maybe given it to someone like UPS or Fedex who track a package effectively… never mind provide a timely delivery.

Upon arrival of these two items, I plan to write a letter to my dear friends at Amazon and inform them of my troubles.

I’ve found that I’m frustrating people who I dislike to upset with some of my planned and repetitive behavior.  Unfortunately I do the same thing just about every day.  You can set your calendar by what I wear for clothes, the list of places I dine at and things I eat could be counted on one hand, and my options of “fun things to do” has remained fairly stagnant over the past few years.  It’s not that I don’t like changing things up, but its very rare that changes are going to make things better for me.  Far more likely, I find myself opting for changes that benefit others because I know they feel pulled down as a result of me… or the changes I’d like to see are simply unacceptable for the standards others.

Most people who have been involved with me when planning some sort of complicated travel plan would believe I’m against traveling.  That is not true; I am no hermit, and I feel quite skilled at navigating complex maps, airports, and directions.  However the whole pre-departure bit can be a challenge for me.  I think I’m using the word challenge a lot, because its more opaque than words like disaster, uncomfortable, terrified, etc.  In my current state, I live with my family, who are all great family members.  As someone who is 21, I have remained with the same privilege level as I did when I was 17 or 18.  This would be acceptable if the state previously established exceeded the limit or would appropriate satisfy the requirements others have of me now that I am 21.  Alas that is not the case.  I am prompted on a daily basis to head to bed before midnight and encouraged to escort my friends out between 11 and 11:30pm.  Sometimes, even waking up early (like 5:45 AM) will invoke a negative response.  Personally, I wouldn’t mind going to bed at, say 11:30pm, if all my work was done and most of the time, I feel I exercise moderately good judgement when deciding when friends should leave.  However, my current environment doesn’t allow me to appropriately practice such decision making skills without feeling dejected and unaccepted.

I progress.  In the past, I have taken a very very very small number of trips that involved a >2 hour drive to a location where we stayed for longer than 6 hours.  I can’t think of any one of those trips that made me feel like I wasn’t a terrible person when I asked-permission/informed parties of my intent to attend or previous act of attendance.  I get very put off to things that produce repeated negative results.  I can certainly understand that a first or maybe second event would produce some spite, but the continual production of it only hampers my will to try again.

Frequently I get upset, looking around at the environment of others and find myself thinking “how did they get there?” but realistically knowing that being able to follow a similar approach would likely not yield the intended results.

Pulling at me is this concept that I am may be a lesser person, or maybe that’s what my conditioning has made me.  Someone who shouldn’t experience, who shouldn’t think, who shouldn’t disappoint… at least for now.  I don’t see others struggle between two, struggling to find the solution that fits both holes no matter how complicated it may be.  On a positive day I would tell myself to keep going, recognizing that progress can only be made by spinning the wheel, even if it doesn’t move where you want it to.  Today is not a positive day. I find myself disappointed in myself on multiple fronts, and presently unable or unwilling to move.  Unfortunately that lack of momentum will hurt me just as much as moving, but I’ve never been able to provide enough.

I’ve come to accept that its my fault, and I’m ok being written off as a failure if you’d like.  If I were someone else, I’d have trouble writing it off as anything else.

Tonight I had the pleasure of viewing The Secret Life of the American Teenager, which really doesn’t describe the show very well at all.  In the show, everyone is having intercourse and everyone knows it.  In addition, just about everyone in the show who has intercourse gets pregnant.  I am not sure what is  the “secret” in this show, since all of the characters know whats going on, but maybe this “secret” will be developed later… unlike 24, where there are over 9000 secrets within the first hour.

The Secret Life (as I believe its commonly reduced to) seemingly portrays a growing trend among teenagers that certain behaviors are common in a high school setting, which I’m not sure is accurate.  One might cite the chiken-and-the-egg argument here, but I could see shows like The Secret Life serving to only increase the behavior amongst teens.  While the show doesn’t represent everything as the super coolest thing ever, I found that negative consequences were commonly downplayed in the show, likely because sad, depressing, and frustrating plots are not popular amonst the target audience.  I’m lead to believe this show, in addition to others on air (I can cite half of MTV’s lineup), serves not as an inspiration, exposure, or a motivator like people tend to associate violent video games with kids shooting people, but more as a catalyst; increasing the rate at which something that was statistically likely to happen anyways does occur.  I dislike this.  While I’ve graduated high school three years ago, I think some of my work still holds true.  The behavior of “impressionables” (aka some teenagers) is heavily effected by those older than them, and those more popular for them.  Fundamentally, I’ve used this to explain why things like curse words are becoming popular at younger and younger ages, and I suspect we’ll unfortunately see the chest fabric density continue to decrease over time.  As a television show, “The Secret Life” suffiently qualifies as popular, despite the lack of Hannah Montanna or Jamie Spears or the Jonas Brothern.  Strangely enough, I found little references to the age or grade of chacters in tonights episode.  New viewers, or people like myself who just have no clue, are left to pick a number for their age,  complimented with the shows plot that builds a high level of presented maturity for most characters, one could easily have replaced reference to school with college and visa-versa.

I think someone out there is thinking they are doing everyone a favor by showing people the potential pitfalls of actions using this show,  but I remember as a teenager I was only motivated more to do better when I had seen that others failed to turn lemons into lemonade.  Luckily, most of my shows which return in the fall have a minimal number of children under 7 and rarely is someone pregnant.  If someone is pregnant on House, NCIS, or Jack Baurer’s distant but young relatives come into play I am going to be tres unhappy.

I hoped to speak about issues more relavent to myself in this post, so let me see if I can get back on track.

Sometimes I find myself conflicted.  Conflicted between what I want to do, what I should do, what I should do for others, and what I should try and get others to want to do.  Together I think those 4 options cover all of my bases very accurately.  Regularly things are requested of me or others effecting me which I’m not very comfortable with, yet I bother not to speak try and do differently.  For example, my mom believes that doing the laundry in the evening/night is a foolish concept… and so it doing laundry on a Sunday, despite the good alignment that presents with my clothes rotation and the decreased load on the electrical grid and the potential cost savings (I doubt SHEL has time of day meters).  I have simply avoided trying to change anyones ways on this, not because I don’t care about it (today Monday I wore Tuesday’s backup shirt…. and that is tres frustrating) but because I’m not very interested in the process by which change can occur.

When I’m on my own, I pretty much control my own process by which change occurs.  Most of the time I like to change things slowly, but when I want to I can change quickly… the important part is that things are up to me.  In some instances where I feel like I should be able to effect some sort of process as a leader/experienced person/alike, I’m finding myself more and more stifled.  Those changes I do see occuring aren’t bad, but they aren’t always what I had in mind, and it would be nice for that to be taken into account once.

I’ll leave you with two thoughts:

1. The average of negative infinity and a high number less than infinity is still negative infinity.
2. I dislike being placed on peoples “creeps” list, and I will pretend to not notice and not take it personally even though it clearly is

Good night moon.

In my spare time while driving, I like to try and do useful things.  [I find the driving implementation of piloting a vehicle very inefficient,  and have plenty of spare brain power units to dedicate to alternative activities.]  During some recent driving efforts, I spent time thinking about how things would be different for a person such as myself, given an alternate series of events.  In order to justify as somethings besides wasting time, I followed the though experiments such that if I felt the outcome of the events were favorable in some sense, I would explore how I could adjust my current position to achive a similiar result… a process generally ending in the nhmo case.. aka no-hope-move-on.

Back to the topic, so I was driving and thinking about alternative realities that could have presented themselves to me, and found but a handful of summarizations to which I can attribute my lack of rememberance in the minds of men.  Typically, I would have assumed that each lack of output would have been the direct result of a *unique* lack of input.  Not true at all.  The same input problem continues to effect seemingly unrelated output.

As I draw this hunting season to a close, I have trouble thinking of whats been done, and done well.  I look at the core objectives and see minimal, or negative progress in some areas; a very discomforting feeling.  And I’m not usually one to enjoy comfortable things, give me an itchy wool blanket any day (assuming it is smallpox free).

I would say “I’m not sure who to blame here” but logically the only thing that can be blamed is the common factor, aka moi.

Its not that I’m not interested.  That is completely false.  I don’t think the bar is low enough for me to bother jumping.  I’ll try most things if there is the slightest glimmer of hope, which I just don’t always see where I should.

Am I not where I wanted, hoped, should, or am suppose to be.  Now what do I do?  Thinking back only pains the part of me that feels I had a chance, still have a chance.

The noise, it indicate a sound, a though, and notion traveling not through space, but social space.  The weight it carries shan’t be metered in frequencies, amplitudes, or modulation but in tone, theme, and weight.  We look not at what is thought but what it done, and not whats already been done but whats going to be done, and hasn’t even been started yet.

I’m good at some of what I do, not what I need to do, but how I need to do.  I think.

I am no poet.

1. I like the new Facebook layout, however I dislike their data streaming methods.  I’ve found the activity streams to generally be outdated and too slow to update.  Manually surfing facebook yields data indicating that people are in fact writing on walls, posting photos, editing their profile yet my frontpage’s activity stream presents none of this information.  Ok, that was a lie.  It presents this information from about 3 days ago.  I go on facebook usually to see things that are occuring in realtime or close to realtime, not for this historical take on things that I’ve missed.  Twitter doesn’t show me what is happening 3 days ago unless there has been an absence of activity, and if facebook is going to go with that model they need to make it work better.
2. Social networks should tell me the extent to which I am someone’s friend.  Every network now lets you hide things from different people, controlling how much of your activity they can see.  Its a completely legitimate feature and I’m not saying it should be done away with… I would just like to know when I’m not your complete friend.  Take a family member as an example, I can opt to suppress them from seeing when I post some photos or something on Facebook and that person would never be for the wiser as it currently stands.  I think that they should be able to see on my profile or page or whatever something indicating that they are blocked from my picture section.  When I’m blocked from something on a social network without knowing it I think 2 things.  1) The website is broken and for some reason that link isn’t working or 2) the person didn’t want to deny me their friendship because that would be rude and we do in fact know each other however I must be an untrustworthy person, which makes me feel sadish… actually more left out but whatever.
3. I am preparing a post some changes that I’ve noticed to vending machines at RPI, particularly the one in my dorm.  I am working on the diagrams in PowerPoint (since it can draw rectangles) and will have them prepared in a short period of time.

Now onto the meat of today’s discussion.

I like to tell myself that I live by a certain code.  It’s an unwritten code that changes from time to time depending on how I’m feeling, but generally it stays pretty much the same.  Some of the more static components include the avoidance of alcoholic beverages and illegal drugs.  The more dynamic components tend to involve things like interpersonal relations, exercise, average driving speed, etc.

Most people tend to classify my driving as slow.  I don’t know why this is.  On highways I tend to average +5 MPH above the speed limit, which is by definition “faster” that I should be driving.  On the rare instance I am feeling luck, you will find me going +7 MPH above the speed limit.  On MA highways that is like 72 MPH, which is 24x the speed at which most people walk.  Out of respect for others I remain in the right lane such that I can be easily passed by the impatient driver who is going faster than my already fast driving.  Yes, sometimes you’ll find me in the passing lane; but only when I am about to pass someone or have calculated that I would need to pass someone within the next 2-3 minutes.  Passengers of mine (in the rare event that someone else is with me) commonly complain or remark on the fact that I could be going faster.  I think liittle of it, but find myself wondering why everyone else is going so darn fast.  If everyone else was going at the speed limit like 65 that I would be certainly be viewed as a fast driver any passengars I did have.  I’ve always wondered what it would be like to go below the speed limit.  Kind of dangerous to think about, right?  What if I only went 60 in a 65.

The nice thing about driving on the highway is you rarely encounter the people that pass you when you reach your destination.  I imagine things would be quite different if, upon arriving to a destination, someone was there to inform me that they made it here first or that they had outperformed me on the highways.  Almost equally as strange would be if someone held up a sign in the window (presumably by a passenger) reading “Look at me, I am passing you’.

While I’ve never experienced those things driving on the highway, I experience them all the time in other areas of my life.  Its not that people show off the behavior/action that some classify as superior, but rather the simple distribution of knowledge.  If I won the lottery I would probably write a blog about it and twitter if.  If I won the lottery every day I don’t think I would, that would be mean/cruel to other lottery players out there.  Following the same logic, I recommend that people examine what they expect as normal and tone it down a few notches.  Personally I think its normal that people don’t carry a bad odor.. however in the event that someone does I don’t state “I showered yesterday, you should have”.. rather I just think to myself that not everyone cares about not smelling like garbage which reduces on a larger scale to “different strokes for different folks.”  As a correlary to that, I suggest people take to ensure their strokes cause little offense to others.

I’ve long accepted the fact that in certainly areas I deliver sub standard performce.  Those areas might include knot identification, things that involve other people, verbal communication, relationships, and design to name a few.  Technology has enabled people to share stuff faster and broader than ever before and I sometimes find it hard to stay optimisitic in an enviroment where people can, so quickly, passively assault me with indicators of their triumph.  *DING* That looks like a clove hitch.  *DING* Pictures with my friends *DING*  Enjoying my spring break *DING*.  Sure, I am glad to hear that things in your life are going well, your sucesses are clearly of unmeasureable magniture and greatness.  While these certainly are not direct cases of bragging in the common sense, they do little to help others who are less skilled.  For example, instead of simply stating that one sucessfully identified a knot, one could provide information to help others.  Instead of just posting that you are having a super spring break, data could be provided to help others enjoy their spring break… for example instead of  “Just saw a great movie” you could say “Just saw Watchmen, it was awsome, definately check it out.”  While I still might be like pfft, I haven’t seen a movie in months, I am at least informed as to which movie I should consider seeing.

I see little reason to hide secrets to success in life, unless your success is built off the failure of others (in which case you are a lousey person).  I do my best to share what I do that works and what doesn’t work… with a heavy focus on what doesn’t work.

Time to stitch 4 buttons back onto some pants.

Its that time again, time to figure out what I’m doing next fall. I have a conceptual problem with everything I need to do, because I haven’t figured out whats going on this summer and I try to take things one step at a time. Summer would be the next step after Spring, not Fall. What is this, some kind of funny dance?

I have to squat my room tomorrow so that I can live in it again next year. There is nothing particularly special about this room, but there is nothing super wrong with it either. I considered living off campus for about 4 minutes, after which I decided it was probably not in my best interests. I enjoy the ability to run away from people/problems/things and go somewhere that I can be alone (or with complete strangers who don’t associate with me.. so its like being alone) and I’ve found that living in a single in the basement of BARH here @ RPI does a provides an adequate space for that. Living off campus would likely place me in close proximity to other people who I knew, making it harder for me to escape from any potential situations that might arise. I also like being lonely in my room sometimes… other times I like to pretend the people in the study room across the hall care about my existence even thought that is never true.

Since I’m squatting a room, and since that room is in BARH, I am required to have a dining plan. The choices are not really super for me. I would like a meal plan that enables me to eat 3 meals a day on 3-5 days a week, and 2 meals a day on the other days. Then I wouldn’t feel bad eating something from the Union, which is not covered by any meal plan. My choices are to eat as much as I want from 7:30am – 3:00pm for ~$1650/semester or to eat as much as I want from 7:30am – 7:30pm for ~$2500/semester. Its a tough call, as I enjoy the convenience of having Commons available for a quick dinner before a Senate meeting or something at 5:00, but I also can’t say that I eat 21 meals there a week. I don’t know how many weeks there are in a semester, but I’ll use the number 17 for my math. Lets say I eat 3 meals a day in a dining hall 4 days each week, that means I miss around 51 meals each semester. Assume an average cost per meal of $7 (2500/(17*7*3)). By not eating 2 meals in the dining hall each week, I am loosing $357 a semester. Honestly I was expecting that number to come out higher, and I suspect I’m doing a very poor job estimating how many meals I consume per week in a dining hall. Too bad I couldn’t access the accounting of this sort of stuff. See I really wish I could do this per meal like some colleges, where you are allocated N meals per week.. or even a declining balance idea. Then I could only buy 15 meals/week or something and use them as I want. That would cover the days I choose to eat lunch elsewhere but eat dinner in the dining hall.

I am actually taking a different approach to some of the math right now. I need decide if dinner is worth 736.5/semester.

Thats only one of the issues to decide on. Technically I don’t have to decide for a long time, but if I say something tomorrow I get $50 free ‘Bonus Bucks’, which is incentive to make a decision. The other issue is the registering for classes next semester.

There is this requirement here at RPI that you meet with your academic advisor before registering for classes… they’ve implemented it in the registration software so you can’t get around it. I’m not opposed to having someone to review my academic and provide any advice they had… I think it could be a really useful experience. Of course the current implementation (at least for me) hasn’t been useful at all. I’ve gotten a new advisor each year I’ve been here and I’ve never met with any one advisor more than once. There is great continuity going on here you can tell.

So I emailed my new advisor to see if he was available for a meeting anytime this week, where I was told to come to his office hours today. I did, showing up 15 minutes after his hours started… someone was already in there with him and there was someone waiting outside so I figured I would be there for like 10 minutes max. I took a seat on the floor a small distance away when another kid showed up and stole my place in line. Big deal, my wait has been extended to 15 minutes. Ha! I wish. I waited there until for 50 minutes for him to get to me in line but it was still not my turn… I was next. The line had grown by 1 student, but I had to dash off to turn in a lab for web system @ 4. I got back to the queue area by 4:16 and the line now had 5 new students in it, just what I neglected to take into account. Everyone getting out of a 2-4 class would be showing up now. I figure the guy has got to notice the bulk of students waiting for advisement, so he should speed the process up or something… nope! I waited an additional 45 minutes, during which he got through 3 students, at which point the designated hours ending.. leaving me + 2 others to figure something else out. I emailed him, explaining how the queue was too long, but he’s unavailable tomorrow and Friday, so I’ve got to wait until Monday to meet with him.. the same day I can register for classes. Hopefully he tell me there is a bulk time for everyone again.. if he does I may camp out in the JEC early so I can get in there without having to wait so long.

Mainly I dislike how I wasted 1.5 hours waiting around today.