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[ChairmanPoo]

Damnit, I've done very very little this week and my sleeping scheudles are messed up.

[Bauglir]

Bleh, I need to get an apartment or something. Due to a surplus of people in the house, I'm sleeping on the floor and it is making it very difficult to actually sleep instead of just lie there with my eyes shut and hope for the best. I'll probably have got used to it by next week, but it's still doing a number on my ability to think straight.

Addendum to previous post, also: The fact that you phrased it as "what I want" instead of "what I have to do" is a muchly good perspective to have, Vector. I do not know if it's a distinction that matters for you, but it's one I often have trouble with, so I thought I'd throw that out there.

[Nadaka]

Sleeping on the floor sucks, perhaps invest in an egg crate or inflatable mattress.

[Vattic]

I'm sleeping on the floor and it is making it very difficult to actually sleep instead of just lie there with my eyes shut and hope for the best. I'll probably have got used to it by next week, but it's still doing a number on my ability to think straight.

If you're anything like me you'll get used to it. The strangest thing is when you then try and sleep in a normal bed again only to find it's far too soft.

[ein]

That exact thing happened to me~
My bed is just a bunch of wool rugs from Pakistan on top of a sturdy futon mattress~

[Lord Shonus]

I have developed an irrational fear of my bedroom wall.

[Truean]

My electricity is out for the third day straight, bought generator (son of a bitch is loud), am going to make the electric company's life hell. Know how to do this, but don't have time really.

I'm in a coffee shop for the internet (power out) and listening to a pyramid scheme being foisted two tables away. Why yes I'm noting what car he's getting into and writing down the license plate.... My my, I do believe the State Attorney General would be quite interested in this. I do hate watching a working man being extorted and taken advantage of while he's just looking for honest work. Poor bastard.

Hello wrath, my oldest sin.
_____________________________________________________________________________________
@ Vector: I don't say this to many people, you are worth it and can actually do things. I am jaded and know the game, you will be able to play one day and you'll have no need or desire to cheat at it like others do.

Moreover, I've no bias. The only way I want into your pants is to see if they fit me.

Honestly though, keep trying, keep learning processes and ways to think/do things to accomplish what you want. My mother received a note saying the school was afraid I had a "mild case of mental retardation," when I was in elementary school. Recently I scared the shit out of that teacher saying if she ever did that again, I'd make sure she forgot what a dime was. It's about time people started proving themselves to us.

[Simmura McCrea]

I have developed an irrational fear of my bedroom wall.

Could be worse. Could be a perfectly rational fear of your bedroom wall.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

If how I feel right now is any indication, I'm pretty sure I'm going to drop dead of overwork by the time the school year is half over.

[Bauglir]

Searching for the parts I need for a project I want to begin has suggested that such parts do not exist, so it looks like I need to learn how to build my own cooling system and then miniaturize it enough to cram it into a backpack-sized package. And then get its power consumption low enough that it can be powered by something smaller than a car battery. Ahahaha, this is so not going to work cause somebody would've done it already. Still, I must try.

Edit: Okay, so apparently thermoelectric cooling is perfect for this aside from the power consumption, but it has a benefit that cannot be ignored. It can do heating, too (saving me precious space), and all you have to do is reverse the polarity. I repeat, there is a problem for which reversing the polarity is the correct solution. Thank you, Star Trek.

[ToonyMan]

"Due to the possibility of hazardous travel conditions around the state following Hurricane Irene, classes are canceled on the Storrs and regional campuses on Monday, Aug. 29."

Look what I just got in my HuskyMail twenty minutes ago.  Thanks a lot Irene.

[Vector]

a. I have succumbed to the manifold seductions of Professor Honeydew D:

b. My introductory rhetoric course is going to be kind of painful in the ease department.  Also, I once again realize exactly how uncomfortable I feel in non-technical majors.  After class--after 50 minutes of the professor explaining how special humans are because they communicate and can rationalize (and the retarded?  and the autistic?  and the untrained?  and the mentally ill?  Is this what really "makes us human beings," and thus worthy of protection?  Do we really want IQ tests to turn into humanity tests?), and furthermore that rationalism began with Descartes, the first person to critique thought itself, to question what made humans special outside of theological constraints (I am somewhat iffy on this one, but... Thales, anyone?  I'm sure this shit started happening earlier than that, and quite possibly in other regions than Western Europe) we moved on to get leaving.

Now, one of the things that happened was that I was going to go up, say hi, ask a little about his definitions and chosen constraints on his thinking, because he'd made them so extremely clear that I felt I could make a little headway, learn something about how he thought.  This group of dudes and women was there already, though.  No problem, thought I'd wait until the end, since the questions would take a while.

Some people asked about the wait list or final exam times.  This included all the women other than myself.  There were also some dudes in this group...

And then came the group of guys who showed up with a big smile, a handshake, and a namedrop (hi, I have nothing to contribute, and am one of 200 students!  Let me personally introduce myself!), or some fucking terrible questions about what was being covered, employed in order to show off how smart they were.  See, I have no issues in general with such things, when one honestly wants to know, but these were just dreadful things about "will you cover the differences between inductive and deductive reasoning" when

i. Asking such a question, in a very fast and assertive way, shows that one is more than comfortable enough with the terminology.

ii. If one is comfortable with the terminology, one knows that that is a very boring question and frankly mostly pointless in the contextual framework the professor set up.

iii. Since the question was prompted by the projected discussion of the detective novel as a device and the professor heavily implied that we would be talking about such forms of reasoning, periphrastically and without name-dropping, the query becomes even more pointless.

iv. This is not knowledge that takes so much effort to gain and control that it is worth showing off.  Trust me.

The main reason why all this annoys me so much is obviously not that the askers were men.  That was just a point of interest for me (maybe the annoying girls will come out in force on Monday).  What bothers me is that I probably won't be able to go into office hours for weeks in order to get my questions answered, because I want to make it completely clear that I want to have a discussion, not an ego-stroking--and dropping names and dates in order to provide reference points for my thoughts would just make me look like I was showing off more, and textbook requests on the very first day of class would be equally rude.

I often wish that everyone followed the Math department's rules of social conduct--don't open your mouth unless you have something useful to SOMEONE to say!  And don't jockey around for name-knowing and attention.  The fact that a man is fairly famous doesn't mean he wants to have anything to do with you.  If you're special, you'll shine all the same, even without showing up with a grin and a handshake.

At least I was the 1/200 student to know the answer to both questions he asked the class.  I'll read up for now, and when it's time I'll be even better-informed.

[KaelGotDwarves]

That's just how it's played though - it's more who you know than what you know. Almost all of the larger "soft sciences" and even the large chem and physics classes I was a part of included much leaping to fight for the limited space under the professor's wing or just to have their face remembered. Our math department had less of that, maybe because the profs I saw honestly disliked most of their students and surrounded themselves with a impermeable wall of grad student TA favourites - I had already passed through advanced calculus so my time with BYU's math department was short.

And being known by superiors is a completely viable strategy: showing off, faking it, or not.

[Vector]

No, that's not "just how it's played."  That's how it's played when you're faking it.  They're not going to be remembered as anything but a fucking irritant that way.

I, luckily, am a lot better at this than most people are--at the very least, I seem to be.  I learned with a group of people where fucking this stuff up can mean a full letter grade's difference, and where professors will make it very, very clear when you aren't doing things right.  They lose nothing by being impolite.

I can sit in the back of a lecture class every morning and do nothing but fall asleep within the first 5 minutes (and never go to discussion sections or office hours, to boot) and have the professor know extremely well who I am, inquire after my welfare, etc.  The question is of how you go about it, and how you make yourself into a breath of fresh air rather than ice cubes down the spine.

[Aqizzar]

I can sit in the back of a lecture class every morning and do nothing but fall asleep within the first 5 minutes (and never go to discussion sections or office hours, to boot) and have the professor know extremely well who I am, inquire after my welfare, etc.  The question is of how you go about it, and how you make yourself into a breath of fresh air rather than ice cubes down the spine.

This was my experience as well.  I never kept up with professors longer than I had a class with them, but all of my "soft science" professors (and I had almost nothing but soft sciences) knew me and appreciated my presence.  Every professor is their own person of course, and ingratiating yourself with them is always a different process.  I had a foreign diplomacy professor who loved making fun of the Soviet Union but hated talking outside of class, a Israeli historian who was a huge Star Trek buff but demanded attendance, and my Econ teach who could talk for hours about the sociological genius of stand-up comedy and 80's action movies but had neither the time nor patience for people who couldn't ace his stupid-easy quizzes.

Point is, you just have to know who you're talking to.

And now I'm all Sad Thread Sad for remembering how many friends I had in the faculty and how I'll never speak to any of them again...