Brian's World

5 Tips

I’d like to offer the inexperienced college student a few tips for an undergraduate experience at college.  While I’m by no means an expert, I’m working on my 7th semester here at RPI and can offer some advice.  This is both for your benefit and for mine.  These tips aren’t ranked, so don’t think that the one ranked #5 is therefore more important than #1 or visa-versa.

1. No one wants to steal your laundry.  I know you think you might need to stand guard over the machines because some jerk could come in and throw your clothes out or take them, but this does not happen. Maybe if your pants were made of gold this would happen but I suspect they are not.  Think about it; no one wants your dirty clothes so they’re not going to steal them from the washer and no one wants to carry a bunch of heavy wet clothes so they’re not going to steal them from the dryer.  If someone did want to take your clothes, which no one does by the way, they would wait until the dryer was done or almost done.  Therefore I encourage you to return to the laundry area within a few minutes of the completion of the dryers (that thing blinking 60 is a timer FYI), this will enable you to confront anyone waiting to steal your clothes and, more importantly, helps free up the machines so I don’t have to relocate your clothes to the floor/table.
2. Yes, I also noticed the mistake in the lecture slides.  Unlike you, I opted to remain silent on the issue because I didn’t want to here the professor spend 7 minutes explaining how he has been using those slides for 20 years and no one has noticed the error and how his error could actually be correct under some very special circumstances like getting struck by lighting during an eclipse.  Also, leaving that error gives a future generation of students something to think about for a second; you wouldn’t want them to have it any easier than you had it, right?
3. The food is never exciting.  I like to laugh when you’re excited about getting 3 cheeseburgers for lunch.  What you don’t realize is that the cheeseburger you chose will be the exact same cheeseburger they will be serving for the rest of your college life.  While you did get 3 of them for only one “swipe” remember that you are paying a lot of money for the ability to swipe, and you would probably have to consume 10 or more to actually break even.  Also, the servers and staff will greet you with strange names such as sweety, honey, dear, etc because they are a) Old and b) Bored.  Georgina has been saying the same thing for the past 4 years.  It has nothing to do with the fact that you are a new student r someone special.
4. Avoid sitting next to me at all costs.  Unless we are acquaintances, there is rarely a need for you to sit in the chair directly to my left or to my right.  Feel free to sit two chairs over, behind me, or in front of me, but directly next to me is reserved for people who I do not have to worry about stabbing me or drawing unneeded attention to my location in class. I will do my best to position myself equi-separated from all parties around me and I encourage you to do the same.  This also applies at dining establishments.  I would greatly appreciate it if you didn’t fill in the stools next to me at the bar unless they are extra separated.. and even that is pushing it.  I will do my best to consume my meal quickly and depart as soon as possible if you just have to sit where I am sitting, but I don’t think its that critical.  Those seats aren’t going anywhere over the next 4 years.
5. Yes, I understand you left 40 minutes before class so you would have plenty of time to get there.  I however left with 4 minutes to get to class, and I would appreciate it if you stayed out of my way.  You’ll know when I’m behind you because I may cough or drag my feet.  No, I’m not turning into some sort of zombie… thought I may bash you over the head if you don’t get out of my way soon enough.  (Just kidding, I’ll just start to get frustrated).  If you could please step off to the side (preferably your left) I can get on my merry way.  If you’d rather avoid these awkward encounters all together, I suggest you densely pack yourselves in the middle of the walkway and hope no bicycles are coming.  I’ll do my best to navigate around you on the wings quickly and quietly.

Returning

I’m back at RPI for the fall semester.  If all goes well I’ll be receiving a diploma at the conclusion of the spring semester.  Sometimes I think back on the past 3 years and find myself loosing track of time.  It seems like only yesterday I filmed my first Student Senate meeting with Andy Clark & Eric Pratt or was briefed by August on the use of LDAP as a datastore.  I’ve found that I don’t spend much time thinking about my accomplishments over the past 3 years, I seem to always a disproportional amount of time on the things that haven’t worked well or have room for improvement.  I seem to abstain from appreciating things that have worked well over the past 3 years like the current implementation of Concerto or the relationships I’ve been able to maintain over only to focus on the more troublesome issues like “Concerto 2” and my unknown future after RPI.  There are times when I think about the future like hrm, this could be the last time you’ll be able to do X or Y as a college student.  I know I’ve passed up my fair share of opportunities and experiences over the past few years which sometimes makes me feel unfulfilled.  Actually,  I don’t know if unfulfilled is the right word… but I’ve digressed.   I think back and say well, ya know you should do somethings to gain the experience and then you’ll sort out the results later.  For the longest time I always thought that the integration of our experiences help to shape who we are, but I’m re-realizing (because I think I had this hypothesis 4 years ago in High School), that its also the things we pass up, the lack of experiences, that define who we are.

This past week has been busy for me working on various RPI projects, all of which I can safely report are behind schedule.  I spent an unanticipated large amount of time on the Concerto Screensaver which people better use.  I don’t enjoy participating in unintelligible and nonsensical adventures, and that has been exactly what this C#/.NET 3.5 process is.  At least it works… for now.  Shuttle Tracking is on hold for the time being.  I ran an apt-get upgrade and SSH decided it wouldn’t come back online.  I dropped by the RPI TV orientation a few times but generally felt out of place so I departed.

I regularly forget that others do not correlate seniority and experience with respect and inclusion like I try to do.  I’m very much bound to CC someone superior to me in an organization when I’m doing anything just to keep them in the loop.  I’ve found that while I don’t always want to hear what they may have to say, its always good to seek their input.  They are the person who has been around longer and 90% of the time they haven’t simply been crowned into their higher rank.

In other news, my door is nearly back to pre-departure condition.  I’m missing one piece of RPI-issue furniture (a shelf that rests on my desk) so I’m having to reorganize things a little bit.  I hope to have the locations of everything resolved by the end of the first week of classes (next week).

Expressive

I have returned from a short stint on Cape Cod.  They have a lot of rotaries there!  I don’t think I’ve seen so many in rotaries in one area in my entire life.  It works out pretty well, providing an adequate means for 4-6 different paths of traffic to converge without having to stop at a series of stop lights.  I heard somewhere that rotaries were better for gas mileage since most people don’t stop completely and you usually get in the rotary pretty quickly.

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.