Brian's World

Hello October

I can’t remember what I usually think of October.  I want to say that I’m usually fairly neutral towards it, but this year I feel like its soliciting some emotional response… maybe good, maybe bad, I can’t tell.  Its an awkwardly placed month, transitioning from summer into winter.  The leaves are falling down off the trees outside it seems, but seeing them linger on the grass or walking through them scattered on the sidewalks is something I miss at college.  Unfortunately for me, RPI keeps on top of the falling leaves.  At least twice a week they clean up the grassy  hill outside my window, leaving me little time to remember that winter is coming.  Most of the walkways I’m on are surrounded by concrete and the other one I stroll on from BARH to campus (on Sherry) is too busy for leaf accumulation.  At least I’ll have my walks on Burdett to Commons each morning, where very few of the houses care to clean up their leaves.

The heat snuck on in my dormitory earlier this week.  Luckily my thermostat was set to 40-something so I didn’t get a full blast of it.  Last night I dared to raise the temperature to something useful in the 60s to ensure I didn’t freeze overnight.  The heat seemed to respond well.  I’m going to try and keep a better eye on it this year so I don’t always have to keep a window open mitigating the difference.

Last week in Professional Development 3 we had to deliver a “60 second sell” to someone about ourselves.  It seems this presentation is somewhat notorious at RPI, but I knew nothing about it.  I spoke about myself for the required minute and received some decent feedback, figuring I’d probably get a B or a low A.  Alas this week the Professor indicates that two Brian M’s were among the top 6 performers.  Buckets!  What was the probability there were 3 Brian M’s in this class?  I assume very low.  Unfortunately this is one of those teachers who makes you do extra work if you stand out, and somehow my performance qualified me for the exact opposite of the experience I had wanted.  She indicated that the 6 of us should distribute ourselves evenly amongst the groups that we were to form and we should be responsible for presenting another 60 second sell to the class.  Luckily my group didn’t ask my name and I pretended she said “Ryan M” so I didn’t feel as guilty.

Sometimes I go out of my way to accomplish something or make progress on a task only to find my efforts fail, go unnoticed or unappreciated.  Take it from a technology perspective:  Everyone is getting used to really cool websites.  If my sites don’t look graphically appealing and have fancy AJAX search boxes they’re just less cool.  Unfortunately for me I’m no expert in AJAX and my version of graphically appealing consists of background-color: blue.  People may rate me as some amateur developer because I can’t make a website that visually competes with site X but I can probably get the pageload just as fast as the other site or the database query to be as efficient as possible.  Another example, the social platform.  I’m known for eating alone, not participating in social activities, and avoiding fun like the plague. That said,  I recognize that such environment may not be as conducive to others.  My attempts to accommodate have gotten me nowhere, leaving me to wonder what faults I’m demonstrating.

Good night moon.