Dr. Solo e-mailed the OChem students yesterday, asking those of us who have a class before his (I have MBIO) to e-mail back. I did as requested. However, I wasn’t expecting to get an e-mail back 10 minutes later… thanking me not only for my e-mail, but also the link… to my website… in my signature… recounting Monday’s events… especially the parts about OChem and the Red Army. Oh, I lose.
So I walked into OChem today, fearing the worst… but everything seemed generally in order. We went over bonding and Lewis structures for about 45 minutes when all of a sudden a new slide appeared! Yeah, it was excerpts from Monday’s blog entry. Dr. Solo proceeded to correct several errata in the aforementioned entry, which are now presented below for correctness, along with my revised description.
- Organic Chemistry is not as scary as I believed it was going to be; our teacher is a Ukrainian who was a Major in the Soviet Union Red Army (okay, for three months). The book is Greek to me; I’ve never been a chemistry kid, but today wasn’t bad at all, and I’m very relieved that Dr. Solo has a good sense of humor. Luckily Jessica is in the class (as well as in my micro class) and she is going to help me with OChem while I help her with micro. To each his strength…
I have to say, I’ve never had this personal of a welcome to class before… :angel:
That’s what our RA teacher refers to Safewalk as— and it’s a great pun 
Safewalk is the program for newly hired RAs that haven’t been assigned to a floor; they work nights and take calls from students who don’t feel comfortable walking home alone. The same benefits of being an RA with not nearly as much work… hence a cakewalk. And that’s how my RA Training class will be as well: a walk in the park. And I have more charisma than any of the other guys in there (hi, ladies 
) although there are only 8 people in the class this semester! Last semester there were 120+ :O
My Discrete Mathematics class will also be obscenely easy. We did a bit of logic today and I spent more of my brain concentrating on not drooling on myself than I did on comprehending the material. Although the teacher is Indian, (Hindi-type, not Native American-type), so his accent is lilting and rather musical, e.g. hard-to-understand.
But today, overall, was definitely a cakewalk.
So my first day of classes is over, and I’m pretty excited about my classes.
- Microbiology will be really fun I think; it doesn’t seem too hard and I enjoy the material. The teacher is nice and the material is laid out clearly.
Organic Chemistry is rather scary, and not just because our teacher is a Russian who was a major in the Russian Red Army. The book is Greek to me; I’ve never been a chemistry kid. Luckily Jessica is in the class (as well as in my micro class) and she is going to help me with ochem while I help her with micro. To each his strength…- I love my French Poetry class, mostly due to Dr. Winston. However, I got into class and sat in the front row. A guy came and sat directly behind me. All through class, he made these little clickings and mutterings in the back of his throat as if he had something stuck in it. And I don’t mean every few minutes, I mean constantly, without pause. He also fidgeted and twitched quite a bit. Then he volunteered to read, and he stuck about six grammatical and pronunciation errors in ONE LINE of poetry! He reads and speaks at a 1000 level and yet he’s in 3853? (Later I found out he’s mildly retarded… autistic. And also an RA. Yay for equal-opportunity institutions… guess he gets passed through every class lest OU be sued or something.
- I walked into George Lynn Cross for my Microbiology Lab and was mildly intimidated. There were mostly juniors and seniors taking the class, and here I am a 17-year-old second-year student… even though I’m a “junior”. The lab seems interesting but intense. I think if I make it fun it will be, otherwise, three hours twice a week will be feeling pretty long.
However, I’m really not enjoying my housing situation this year. That actually doesn’t convey my feelings. Um. Really. I signed up for the same room in Honors because I enjoyed it so much last year. It was quiet, conducive to studying, and there were lots of great guys on my wing to hang out with. This year, it’s louder than Walker, which had the Gigglies. Worse, it usually congregates near my room. Not to mention the constant racial slurs and cursing that get bandied around. I’ve taken to escaping over to Cate Main, which is incredibly quiet this year. I suspect it’s because, as Sam said, mostly upperclassmen spent time in Main and now there are none left. Ah well, at least I have one sanctuary left. But I’d rather that sanctuary be my room…
…and here I return from Cate and they’re playing video games, loudly, without headphones. Whatever happened to worrying about bothering your roommate? That’s why I always wear my headphones. Meh. Next time James leaves the room I’m going to scope out his TV and figure out what connections it has and go buy him headphones. I’m sick of it already and it’s not been a week.
Tomorrow will be fun… Discrete Structures and RA Training, woo! Then a barbecue at the campus house, but at least Sam will come so I won’t be totally the odd one out…
So Firefox is broken in Ubuntu right now, and I needed a browser fast. Fired up Konqueror and it FLIES. It’s still quite a bit clunkier than Firefox, but it’s faster, has KDE integration (which is my current kick), and the fonts actually work, which Firefox is having a bit of problem with right now.
I’ll probably switch back after Firefox starts working again… but it’s nice to know that there are solid alternatives to the alternative browser of choice.
I set up The File Browser last night on the Photos page and it is going to be outstanding. I’ve searched so long for a gallery that is very minimal— I don’t want user registration, guest albums, ratings, comments, plugins, any of it! I just wanted a simple gallery that I could upload folders of images to via FTP, and it would figure out the rest itself. TFB is just such a program. I had to do some serious hacking on it; it was created for fluid layouts instead of my fixed-width page, and it wasn’t compatible with XHTML 1.1 (because it used document.write), but in the end it was well worth it. Photos, here we come!