beandelphiki

*deep breath*

I really wish people would just rent a laptop and book a study room when they need to do a group project on a computer.

I guess that's not really fair - college students can't go throwing money around, even if it's not much to rent a laptop - but how did I end up sitting across from the three loudest girls in the room, working on a project? And the loudest one has a new tongue stud, or braces, or SOMETHING, because she sounds like she has marbles in her mouth.

Also, my wrist hurts. And the keys on the computers in the lab are so old and sticky you practically need to smack each one with a mallet.

Maybe I should go rent a laptop.


Edit: The lab monitor just told them to shut up. HEE.

Doing some more Calibrated Peer Reviews.

Seriously, I could CRY. On our last round, two out of three essays I marked were terrible. This round (writing a lab report introduction from a provided procedure/materials/results write-up) also seems to be following that pattern - the last one I marked was SO bad I was forced to flunk it. It's the first one I've actually flunked. And the one I'm looking at now isn't much better - if it actually isn't worse.

*skims* Okay...it's worse. Jesus. HOW are these people ever going to work in a laboratory if they can't bloody read basic instructions?! E.g. DON'T put the procedure in a lab report introduction! Both have! Neither have a hypothesis! Both re-state the results! Which, obviously, are already IN the "results" section of this hypothetical report.

And neither paper so far has been able to follow APA format - holy fuck, the one I'm looking at now cites one source as, "Adobe Acrobat file." OMFG.

Why can't I just write, "You've got to be fucking kidding me," on these? Because I really, really want to.


...I don't drink, so I can't drink heavily to get through this. Maybe I'll deal by going and looking for some pr0n again. Even if it's bad, it's bound to be better than THIS.



Also, my image host appears to have been abducted by aliens. Like, the site isn't even there anymore. Buh? Possibly they just had a major server crash or something, but if it's not back in a day or so, I guess I'll be re-uploading everything somewhere else.

Does Scrapbook actually work for mood icons? Since I'm paid up for a while, I might as well take advantage of it if it'll work.

My biology course this semester is doing this bizarre thing called, "Calibrated Peer Review," or "CPR." (And if THAT isn't a confusing acronym, I don't know what is.) The website describes it thusly:

Calibrated Peer Review (CPR)™ is a Web-based program that enables frequent writing assignments even in large classes with limited instructional resources. In fact, CPR can reduce the time an instructor now spends reading and assessing student writing.

What this means is that, above and beyond the regular classroom work, we're all expected to write three extra writing assignments (around 500-600 words each) and submit them online, "calibrate" ourselves by marking three instructor-written essays of varying levels of technical skill, and then mark and comment on three pieces written by our classmates. If you aren't within a certain amount of allowed deviation when you mark the calibrations, you have to do it again until your calibrations are on par; following that, the marks you assign your fellow students are weighted according to how well you matched the instructor's marking on the calibrations.

I call this system, "a waste of my fucking time - YOU'RE the instructor, YOU mark it," but whatever. I'm not exactly going to sacrifice these grades, either.


I just finished my calibrations and got the results back. I was vaguely surprised to see that my grading and answers to the "guiding marking questions" were in some places off the instructor's by as much as 50%, so I asked to see the full comparative breakdown.

Aaand...( apparently, you wouldn't want ME for an English teacher )

My computer programming exam is in three hours.

I haven't slept because I took some Dexedrine in order to be able to wake up...and then took some more, just to be sure...and then it was TOO much Dex, and I was awake all night. Smoooooth.

Now it's 5:30 and I'm wide awake and have been up for the past hour and forty-five minutes. But I haven't studied because I'm too jittery and wound up.

Ugh.



Got a haircut yesterday, at least. And Christmas shopping for my coworkers done. Geeked for a bit over Restoration Hardware stocking stuffers, which I'm kind of hoping some of which make an actual appearance in my stocking, since I talked them up to Mom. (Click here and scroll down to "Tools and Gadgets" to see what I mean.)

Also found the December issue of SFX (the Who special) at Great White Games. I noticed some stuff behind the counter that they didn't have on display, so I guess next time I'll ask if they carry DWM.

I think I'll go to the school now. Maybe I can study there.

God, I don't even want to THINK about my Geography exam tomorrow. Don't even go there, self.

I expected to be going a little nuts without lj, so I decided to - gasp! - attempt to do some homework. But I was so tired for some reason that even after taking my Dexedrine, I managed to fall asleep in front of the computer and sleep through the entire move. Heh. I woke up to refresh LJ Status, and it went from saying, "We've taken the site down [six minutes ago]," to, "Livejournal is back up. Expect slow page loads."

I hope and trust everyone's move went okay?



My film class watched Lola rennt (Run Lola Run) on a day when I wasn't there, and I just watched it yesterday in the library to catch up. I went in blind, having no idea whatsoever what it was about, but it scored big points with me when I realised: This movie is about time loops! Heh.

Overall, a really cool movie, although it was one of those ones that was really hard to sit through for some reason. Some movies are just like that for me - no matter how good they are, I struggle to sit still and watch them. And then I definitely can't watch them twice. Movies with a slower, thoughtful pace tend to fall into this category, as well as movies that require me to be pretty mentally alert to follow them more than superficially. (Citizen Kane, for example, despite being genius, is hard for me to watch.) This movie is supposedly pretty fast-paced, but the fact that the story is repeated several times, albeit differently each time, makes it rather slow to me.

I liked the soundtrack, so I went looking on iTunes and mininova to see if I could find it, with not much luck thus far except for finding the music that plays over the interludes between runs.

I did, however, read the Wikipedia page on it, and noted this bit, from the summary of her third run:

[Lola] hitches a ride in the same ambulance, unnoticed by the driver, as it stops in front of the crew with the window pane. The ambulance is carrying Schuster, the security guard from her father's bank who has apparently suffered a heart attack, as foreshadowed by his clutching his chest and his loud heartbeats in the Second Run earlier in the film. Although some English subtitles here have Lola saying, "I'll stay with him," the actual German line is, "Ich gehöre zu ihm," which translates as, "I'm with him," or, "I belong with him." She holds Schuster's hand, and moments later, his heart rate begins to return to normal. The paramedic is stunned and relieved.

(Bolds mine.)

Okay, a question for the Germans on my list, if you see this:

Which translation do you think is the better one? Is, "I'll stay with him," something that fits how her words would generally be taken, regardless of how it literally translates? Or did the people who wrote the English subtitles just mess up?

Ugh. Just finished my comprehensive Geography midterm.

Unweighted, my mark in this course is a bare pass. (I didn't do so hot on the first quiz.) Properly weighted, it's about a 75%. But this last midterm? Is worth 25% of my mark. And I DEFINITELY just bombed it. Had to leave an entire page of short-answer questions blank, for god's sake. I didn't have a clue.

I studied for this stupid thing for FOUR HOURS. I checked the course syllabus online before I began studying, and since it didn't specify the material, I assumed it was for all the chapters we've completed thus far (five in total). So I managed to get through the first three in detail and skimmed the last two, thinking that I was at least guaranteed to pass.

And the test was on the fourth and fifth chapters. Everything I DIDN'T study. Fifty multiple-choice questions and 34 marks worth of short answer, and there were maybe 10 questions that didn't sound like gobbledigook.

So I just found my hard copy of the syllabus, and the midterm material is penned in on it - they forgot to include that information on the syllabus originally, and I wrote it down the first class and forgot all about it.

I'm just...really mad at myself. For the hit my already suffering grade will take, for my stupid oversight, for the wasted time I spent studying material I didn't need to. By the time the final rolls around, I bet I'll have forgotten it.

It stings that between all the classes I've missed due to being ill recently, my weak grades and my general tendency to be late to everything (including, most likely, my own future funeral), I KNOW my instructor thinks I'm a worthless slacker. I made it into class today as he was starting to pass out the bubble sheets (FAR from the last one there, maybe two minutes after the official start of class), and I didn't miss the faintly annoyed expression he made at my mere appearance. People who came in afterward got smiles.

I'm the annoying one. AGAIN.

I'm really, really hating this class.



WHAT made me think that this school year would be any different? All I do is fuck up.

A question for you guys:

Is there really any food or substance which (in your personal experience) ACTUALLY works as an aphrodisiac?

I know there's a lot of mythology out there (oysters and so on), but does anything really, truly increase libido?

(Other than any drug that's actually meant to, like Viagra. Viagra might not actually be officially considered an aphrodisiac, but considering some of the second-hand accounts I've heard of its effects on people, I think it might as well be one.)

I'm just wondering if there's something I'm doing or eating differently lately that I could STOP doing or eating.

I am taking more Dexedrine for school, but since I'm ingesting it orally, I would think that it wouldn't have the same effects as amphetamines taken recreationally. (Besides, I'm pretty sure that's just meth, and doesn't apply to Dex whether I was snorting it or not.) And the only thing I think I'm really eating that much more of is salad, and well.

Eggs, button mushrooms and spinach aren't aphrodisiacs, are they? I really wouldn't think so.

I have hoooomewooork! Eleven pages of how globalization is affecting the Muslim world, and a debate on the "clash of civilizations" tomorrow to prepare for - to say nothing of my geography quiz to study for, my programming readings, my film study readings, and all the math I'm behind on.

(Why yes, I did spend today in bed in agony with my shitty back! Missed my first class because I was so tired I slept in, and then when I woke up, I was physically unable to get out of bed. So I spent all day in bed with a heating pad, and finally made it up and loosened up with heat patches. FTL.

Which leaves me even more to catch up on. Sigh.)

And this is very distracting on a day-to-day basis. How do you some of you people cope?!

Edit: Apparently there's a keyboard shortcut for "post." Wish I knew what THAT was so I could avoid it.

[Error: unknown template qotd]

...I honestly think the fact that someone would even ask this question is sick. I live in a country with a universal health care system: a system which is currently under attack from critics who think we would do better to just make health care a free market (or at least put some services on the market - like expensive surgeries), and I'm TERRIFIED this will happen.

Don't get me wrong, Canada's health care system is in huge crisis right now. But that doesn't scare me anywhere NEAR as much as the proposed alternatives, where only the rich could afford to see a doctor.

And some of the people who are pushing this the hardest are here in the redneck west, Alberta. Alberta is RICH right now, and yet, the government is somehow failing to put enough money back into health care to keep the system from its rapidly speeding demise. The numbers and news stories just get scarier: more than half the family doctors in Calgary have plans to close their practices within the next few years because of the soaring overhead costs, and hospitals (according to one news story I read some months back) are considering lining the hallways with beds because they don't have enough rooms. (For all I know, they might already have started doing so.) The big story in previous months has been the fact that pregnant women were being turned away from hospitals in droves for lack of beds and being told to seek midwives - a service many, many women can't afford.

It's ALREADY a privilege to have a doctor in Calgary; not necessarily because you can't personally afford it, but because the health care system is so pressed for money that the equipment, space, doctors and nurses simply aren't there.

(Disappointingly - and bitterly so - there is also no real effort being made to increase the number of available spaces in most of Canada's programs of medical study. Many Canadian premed students end up in foreign universities, then foreign residencies, and never make it home to practice. On top of all the doctors fleeing the system here, we are losing an untold number of potential FUTURE doctors.)

So the solution is apparently to put it all on the market and let the health practitioners make up the difference by charging people an arm and a leg to get off the months-long waiting lists for any kind of specialty help.

And if you can't afford it, well, you could be on those lists for much, much longer.


But hey, every Albertan got a $400 cheque last year! Not nearly enough to cover many health care costs for ANYONE directly, but at least everybody got the same amount! That's fair, yeah?

It's just not just.



Which reminds me, I finished all those Globalization readings yesterday (finally!), and I read something from a Scientific American article in my coursepack that made me cry:

According to the estimates of the U.N. Millennium Project, all it would take to lift every single person on the African continent who is currently living in extreme poverty (extreme poverty being defined as making less than $1 a day and being unable to afford the basic necessities of life - including basic health care, ahem) out of it is 0.5% of the combined GNP of donor countries.

...

Also, Americans (this being an American publication, there were no numbers for Canadians) generally see foreign aid as, "throwing money away," because they think quite a bit of money is going towards foreign aid, and don't see anything happening.

Yet when polled as to the amount of money they believe is being spent on foreign aid, Americans overestimate the amount by as much as 30 times.

...Just something to mull over.

( Nevermind, I'm a dumbass )

Edit: Oh god, the answer was like, *valleygirl* DUUUUH!

With one small (well, maybe not small, but whatever) sticking point, this week is ending on a MUCH better note than I would have thought.

1. Since I didn't exactly make an official announcement at the time, I will now:

I got into Mount Royal's Bachelor's of Science program. Wheee!

My major right now is, "general science," which I realize isn't a real major, but I'll be tailoring my program to reflect biology/health science courses, and possibly transfer to the U of C in two years as a bio major.

2. Unfortunately, because I was registered VERY late, most of the classes I need to take this year are full. But I am currently registered for:

-"Introduction to Computer-Based Problem Solving for Scientists" [programming]
-"Calculus for Scientists I"
-"The Physical Environment" [geography - next year I take geology]
-"Globalization" ["foundation level" elective]
-"Introduction to Poetry" [elective]
-"Introduction to the Study of Film" [elective]

...Cool, eh? ( More blather about my course requirements )

BUT. I'm in the, "Intro to the Study of Film" class! I've wanted to take that course since the last time I went to Mount Royal, i.e. five years ago. They can't MAKE me drop it!

Although...I'm in the same section of that class as my sister. Gonna be weeeird much?

3. None of my teachers thus far seem to care a whit that I missed the first day. Whew! Although my family members and coworkers have now all either heard the story or have passed on this, "guess what Dan did THIS time," tidbit, so I guess I entertained some people.

4. My programming teacher is kind of awesome. BUT he wants us all to download Alice to our home computers. Difficult for most people? Surely not. But with MY issues with the space on our comp...urk.

I've been meaning to get a laptop of course, and in that case, I'd simply put Alice on my own machine. But I'm sure I won't have my own laptop by the point where I'll need to start using Alice at home.

So today, I got an iPod instead. Transferring ALL my music on it should free up nearly a gig's worth of space on our comp. Plus I can put the Doctor Who audiobook I've got on it...and possibly some video.

Eighty gigs, you guys. I can't EVEN wrap my brain around that kind of space. It's charging right now, and even with all my music loaded to it, the amount of space that takes up on it is so small that I had to put my face up to my computer screen to see the sliver of blue that appeared at one end of the grey "capacity" bar.

I mean. WHAT.

5. Ugly point of the week - the MRC bookstore took me for $320 when the debit connection failed on me. They didn't let me have my textbooks, AND the transaction went through. But I'm going back on Monday with my bank records, and if they don't either refund the money or give me my books, you can BET I'm gonna throw a blue hairy.


Sooo, all in all, a good week. *whistles*