Sunday, September 28, 2008
Saturday, September 20, 2008
Well, now that I've been back at school for a few weeks, I can start updating this blog again.
My literature class so far is really interesting--we're reading a lot of books by Thomas Hardy and Charles Dickens, and we're also learning a lot about Victorian England. On Wednesday, I gave a presentation on "changes in perceptions of time, speed, and distance in the Victorian Era" with three other people in the class. It's much more interesting than it sounds. For example: did you know that people thought the telegraph would solve all the world's problems by allowing everyone in the world to talk with everyone else? Or that the invention of the telephone was seen as an unimportant step in the process of improving the telegraph? Or that France wanted there to be a Paris Mean Time instead of a Greenwich Mean Time? See, more interesting than you thought, isn't it?
This semester, I have also discovered the joy of cooking. You see, at Mudd, you can sign up for getting 8, 12, or 16 meals a week from the dining hall. Last semester, I had 16 meals a week. This semester, I instead decided to opt for having 12 meals a week, a minifridge, and a microwave. (And since I bought my appliances from other students, a refrigerator and a microwave cost $20.) Since some of my friends have kitchens and others have rice cookers and electric woks, I've started to get more creative with my meal replacements. I can make macaroni and cheese with bell peppers. I can make sodas using seltzer water and juice. I'm probably making banana bread sometime soon, since my bananas are going brown faster than I anticipated. The possibilities are not quite endless, but I find them more appetizing than the food at the dining hall.
I also built a desktop at the beginning of this semester. It was a lot more complicated than I anticipated--a good 4 hours elapsed between when I opened the boxes and when I turned the computer on. I'm right now trying to figure out a way to make Windows work without making all my USB ports stop working. On the plus side, I now know the identity of every part in my computer--something I never knew before. This is also the first time I've built a desktop from scratch, so now I know how all of the hardware fits together.
[Edit:] Apparently building a computer is also a laboratory assignment for E85. Kind of neat to know.
My literature class so far is really interesting--we're reading a lot of books by Thomas Hardy and Charles Dickens, and we're also learning a lot about Victorian England. On Wednesday, I gave a presentation on "changes in perceptions of time, speed, and distance in the Victorian Era" with three other people in the class. It's much more interesting than it sounds. For example: did you know that people thought the telegraph would solve all the world's problems by allowing everyone in the world to talk with everyone else? Or that the invention of the telephone was seen as an unimportant step in the process of improving the telegraph? Or that France wanted there to be a Paris Mean Time instead of a Greenwich Mean Time? See, more interesting than you thought, isn't it?
This semester, I have also discovered the joy of cooking. You see, at Mudd, you can sign up for getting 8, 12, or 16 meals a week from the dining hall. Last semester, I had 16 meals a week. This semester, I instead decided to opt for having 12 meals a week, a minifridge, and a microwave. (And since I bought my appliances from other students, a refrigerator and a microwave cost $20.) Since some of my friends have kitchens and others have rice cookers and electric woks, I've started to get more creative with my meal replacements. I can make macaroni and cheese with bell peppers. I can make sodas using seltzer water and juice. I'm probably making banana bread sometime soon, since my bananas are going brown faster than I anticipated. The possibilities are not quite endless, but I find them more appetizing than the food at the dining hall.
I also built a desktop at the beginning of this semester. It was a lot more complicated than I anticipated--a good 4 hours elapsed between when I opened the boxes and when I turned the computer on. I'm right now trying to figure out a way to make Windows work without making all my USB ports stop working. On the plus side, I now know the identity of every part in my computer--something I never knew before. This is also the first time I've built a desktop from scratch, so now I know how all of the hardware fits together.
[Edit:] Apparently building a computer is also a laboratory assignment for E85. Kind of neat to know.
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