Wednesday October 1st, 2008

Today the sky is scary looking.
My violin came but the mail room is closed.
Calculus is so easy.
Shirley had her first Dr. Pepper a few weeks ago and loved it, so we bought a pack. to "drink responsibly."

how cute is that?

I got an 82 on my Chemistry Test. I was well-prepared mentally but not physically.

I was so nervous, and it took so long that I wanted to leave rather than check over it.
That was the worst mistake. I should have checked over it and caught the 2 errors that cost me 18 points. well 17. I lost one point because my answer was off by 0.001, and that's ridiculous because pretty much the whole class lost that point on account of the teacher doesn't even know what the rules are for significant figures and told us two different things both of which do not accord to the textbook. but the real answer was in the text book. So I learned who to believe. and that it's useless asking questions.

Really he's a nice guy, and tries to make chemistry interesting, but...
he doesn't teach from what he knows, he teaches from our textbook. I could just take notes out of the book and learn more efficiently than by paying attention to the lecture (which often contradicts the book because the teacher misunderstands).

Cliches come up and I attend (and pay attention to) every lecture. I've started to bring my book to class and follow along with the lecture so that I'm less likely to get bad information.
I'm going to ace the next chem test.

The calculus test was easy, though. I hope I didn't make any careless errors on it. I didn't have time to double check because I took the whole hour working the problems.
and I walked out feeling like a genius because math now requires ingenuity and not rote memorization of formulas.

Outside of school.. I volunteered to help register voters. In the last election, the percentage of students eligible to vote that actually voted was around 20% (I heard from a representative of the Obama Campaign). The people I asked all said they were registered to vote, except one who said she tried to register in Pittsburgh and couldn't, but we figure out the problem. I helped one person register to vote!

I quit after that because I have midterms. Chem and Calc are over, but next week I have Physics (some time next week we don't know when) and Engineering is supposed to be the 20th.

I signed up for the Outdoor Leadership Experience run by some eagle scouts for people in the honors college who never did outdoor leadership stuff. It's supposed to be in Laurel Ridge (where the physics thing was before). Laurel Ridge is just lovely.

Shirley Ma is so much fun. I'm glad she's my roommate, and we're like best friends. I'm also pretty glad we are taking the same typa classes. She's better at chem than I am, and I help her with physics and calc, and then we are in the same group for engineering so we do our programming hw together.

OH and you know Vampire Weekend, the really awesome band that I discovered on SNL? I get to go to a free concert this weekend because I am registered to vote. It's sponsored by the Obama campaign.

I finished writing my editorial, but I am going to look over it one more time and print it, because it weighs a lot in my grade.

I got an Engineers Without Borders t-shirt that looks really cool, and a Habitat for Humanity t-shirt that says on the back:

"my plans for Saturday..." with a floor plan under that hahha


I'll add more at some point.
bye