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BrandonSecond30Blogs

Page history last edited by PBworks 18 years, 3 months ago

60. Rode back with one of my brother's best friends today. He is a senior and lives in The Graduate, an apartment building, with one of my brother's other best friends. It was a fun ride becasue he has the same taste in music as me, so we got to listen to all sorts of good stuff on the way back. It was raining and really crappy outside the whole way back though, which made the ride a little more miserable. My brother's other friend was leaving at almost exactly the same time as we were, so we "raced" back to college. Unfortunately, we got caught behind several trucks on the way back, so we didn't make it back first. Fortunately though, we made the normally 3 1/2 hour drive in under 3 hours, with 2 stops along the way.

 

59. Today was my last full day being home. I went out with my best friend from high school who was our senior class president. Me and him both get along with just about everybody in our grade and even in most of our school. After going out to eat dinner, we went out with a girl and her friend that he knows from another school. We went all over the place, including into a bar where she knew the bouncer. It was a pretty good time, and it was great to see my best friends again during the whole break. I also got to see all the parts of my town that I haven't been in in a while, including taking the back roads to get places, which I still remembered without any trouble. Even after being gone for months, I still feel like I never left, while at the same time feeling a sense of awkwardness while I was home. I am "homesick" to be back at Penn State I think, because that's more of my new home.

 

58. We lost in the quarter-finals of the tournament. We were second in our division and we beat a team that has beaten us all 4 times that we have played them, and has won the tournament a couple of times. We haven't won a tournament yet, but we've made the semi-finals several times and earned the first place seed for the tournament several times, just to be narrowly eliminated later. It would be nice to win a tournament, but we play just for the fun of it anyway, so it doesn't really matter. After the tournament I went to my friend's house for a party, and there were a lot of people there. I hadn't eaten in a while, so we went out to after not being at his house for too long.

 

57. Dodgeball tournament tonight, and I'm excited for it. It is going to be a good time, whether we win or lose. We are missing our other really good player, but I think we should still be fine with the team that we have ready to play. I am excited because I haven't gotten to play a game for several months now, and it really is one of the most fun activities that you can do. One time when we were playing dodgeball in a racquetball court just for fun, I threw the ball and one kid ducked to get out of the way, and it smashed him in the side of the head and he got a concussion. I felt pretty bad but it was pretty funny at the same time, he missed school for a couple of days and then spent a few days in the nurse's office when he came back. I felt really really bad about giving him a concussion, but at the same time, it was pretty funny that I managed to give somebody an injury with a rubber kickball.

 

56. Haha, this is getting really repetitive now. Stickies every night, but its all good. Played football yesterday during the day. It was freezing outside, but it was still fun. We play football during the winter every year, we always have. We like playing tackle down on the field especially when there is snow on the field because it just adds to the environment of the game. Only my one other friend and I ever actually played football for a serious team, so it isn't really fair when our other friends try to tackle him or me because we can usually break the tackles. Also, it is easier for us to tackle them properly or strip the ball from them. On one play, I just grabbed the ball out of my one friend's hands and ran it back for a touchdown and he got pissed off and left, so I felt a little bad about that, but the game in general was fun anyway.

 

55. Went to Eat n Park again tonight. Also got grilled stickies a la mode again. They are really good, and incredibly filling for such a small amount of food that it actually is, but it is dense so it fills you up quickly, I recommend them to anybody. This is a fun way to spend break, because I get to see everybody that I haven't seen or really had good conversation with in a long time, and it is good to catch up and just joke around like we used to. Everywhere I go, people say "Prus, it's good to have you back"(Prus being my last name). People just seem to enjoy my sense of humor and enjoy me making jokes and making fun of people when they do stupid things that other people might not catch.

 

54. I had to pick up my brother from the airport this morning at 9:30, and it is a half hour away, so I had to leave at 9, so I had to get up early, which I wasn't looking forward to doing at all over break. While waiting for him and circling around the roads by the airport, I had to circle almost 10 times because the airport lost his bag as well as everybody else that took the delayed plane from Daytona and missed their connection to Pittsburgh after staying the night in Atlanta, so that took longer. I like driving, I always have, and it's nice to be able to do it whenever I want now that I am home. I don't like driving so much that I like ferrying people around place to place, so it's good I don't have to do that, but it is a good thing to do, especially because I can listen to the radio, something I haven't done since I've been at school because I am usually in my dorm room or out walking somewhere, where the radio isn't playing, except on the buses where they play whatever the bus drivers like and I don't have a real chance to listen to it anyway.

 

53. My brother's flight from Daytona to Atlanta got delayed, so he isn't going to be coming home tonight. Today was also a good day. I have needed the week away from stress and everything on me, so today I just turned my phone off and sat around and watched TV all day. It felt like exactly what I needed. After relaxing all day, I just feel totally refreshed after feeling more and more drained after every day of stuff that I've had to do. I haven't had to wake up early, so I can just sleep in and relax. I still feel awkward being home, because I'm just so used to the college environment, with the dining halls real close so I can eat whenever I want and just roll out of bed and basically to a meal.

 

52. Tonight was a good night. I got back around 6:30 or so, and then I ate dinner with my parents, my brother is not home yet. My brother will be coming home tomorrow night and then I can hang out with him if I want, if he isn't in bars all the time(he's 21 now). Anyway, tonight I went to Eat n Park with a few of my old high school buddies, most of who are on the same dodgeball team as I am, we formed it together. I had grilled stickies a la mode, which is 2 stickies grilled in butter and then a scoop of ice cream on top, I got a scoop of chocolate. They are probably one of the most unhealthy things you can eat, but they taste great and are incredibly cheap, so it's hard to get anything else.

 

51. I got home today for the first time in several months. It is nice to be home, but it feels really weird. With both me and my older brother gone at college, my parents have obviously been bored. They cleaned our whole house and it looks really weird. On top of that, my room isn't clean anymore because my parents messed it up looking for stuff to bring me when they came up to visit. I had cleaned my room for the first time in literally years right before I left to come up here, and now I will have to clean it again sometime, which is not something that I am looking forward to doing.

 

50. I am leaving to go home today. I had to hand in a math homequiz today before I leave, but I just e-mailed it to my teacher a while ago. I am riding home with a buddy from my floor and then staying at his house for a while when we get back until my parents can pick me up to take me home. Once I get home I am expecting to go back out again after a family meal and calling all my old buddies that I know are already around in order to see them and go out with them. There is really too much that I want to do during the nights back home that I don't think I'm going to have time to do.

 

49. It is almost time to go home for Thanksgiving break. I would like to go home and just get a break from everything up here, have no stress from classes or tests or work that is due. Although even when I go home, I have stuff is due the night after the day I go home. It will be nice to see all my old buddies from high school. Although I absolutely love it up here, I think that I need a break in order to hold out until the end of the semester doing my best work possible, which is pretty important in order to keep everything in order. Also, I need to get ready for next semester when my classes crush me, haha.

 

48. I found out that I have a dodgeball tournament whenever I go home for Thanksgiving break. I love playing dodgeball, and I play on a tournament team and we usually do pretty well. We have made the semi-finals several times and haven't not made the finals only once. The only time that we didn't make the finals was our very first tournament. In order to make the finals, there are several divisions of 4 teams, and the best 2 from each division win after everybody plays each other. It's really a pretty sweet game and a pretty sweet time, and I love it. I also love being one of our teams "captains" because they rely on me to control the game a lot and listen to me, and it's fun being able to control the flow of each game.

 

47. The rain finally stopped. It warmed up just a little bit as well. It was nice to get a good change in the weather aside from freezing cold and rainy. Snow would also be nice, I like snow better than rain. Cold with rain is probably the worst weather that you can have. There is almost nothing worse that can happen than cold with rain, because it just makes everything soaking wet and miserable. I will be glad in the sprint or summer when it is hot and there is no rain, and no more worry of cold days for a long time.

 

 

46. It seems like it has been raining every day. Every time that it is raining, I lose motivation to go to classes that don't have attendance taken. Those classes are also the same classes that I don't really learn anything in though because I've done it all in high school before, so I don't feel too bad not going. It is funny though, because I miss quite a few of my math classes and still score 15 points higher than the class average on the test because I've done all the stuff before. I enjoy having time to just sit around though.

 

45. So my friend that seemed to be wanting to quit more than I wanted to last week and is my closest friend of the other pledges decided to quit. He was the one that really talked me back into staying and not quitting, because I knew how tough of a time he was having, and if he was going to push it out, I had to push it out with him. We had pledged together and decided that we would finish together, but now he quit, so I joined him. I know, I need to make up my mind over something, but I only stayed because I didn't want to let everybody down, but now, I feel that there is truly no point left in staying.

 

44. Wow, I am confused right now. I was even more confused last night, but oh well, it's a good story at least. Anyway, we were at a friend's apartment last night hanging out, and then the cops showed up cause the radio was too loud or something, so we all had to walk past 3 cops and out the door and then we decided to walk down 10 flights of stairs instead of waiting for the elevator in front of them. Then we made it back to our dorm in East, and the shit just hit the fan. I had three friends who should have DEFINITELY been in better shape than me, very sick, and needed to be taken care of, so who took care of them? Yeah, surprisingly me, the one who by all physical means should have been in the worst condition of any of them(if you want exact reasons why, just ask me and you will be surprised). Anyway, so while I'm taking care of these three friends and making sure they get to bed alright and don't like die(not that I thought that they would because the fact that I was the one that was taking care of them meant that I was fine enough and they definitely wouldn't die), but anyway, my phone rang. One of my friends(female) from home was visiting her boyfriend that goes to school here at PSU was BAWLING and was feeling really shitty because she like got in a fight with her boyfriend or whatever and she might need a place to stay, so she said she'd call me back later. So while taking care of my three friends I had to worry about my other friend from home who was visiting and had to figure out something to do with that, luckily she ended up making up with her boyfriend or something and found a place to sleep. So eventually I got everybody to their own beds after about an hour or two, then I hung out for a little while more around the floor and then headed to bed myself.

 

43. Still busy. Had three midterms this week, and it sucks having three in one week. I had two back to back midterms on Wednesday night, and that was about as rough as it gets, especially after being out or in class all day since about 9 am. Sometimes I am absolutely amazed at how busy I am and how little time I have to myself and how I surprisingly manage to survive and not die of stress or anything like that. I am still waiting for Thanksgiving, counting down the days until I get a break from everything, a few days off, get to see all my old buddies from home, and eat decent food.

 

42. It appears that I have changed my mind about quitting the fraternity. I don't really know why I decided to not quit, I have no real motivation to stick with it and lately I've been so exhausted I almost have no motivation to do anything. I really just need a break from everything for a while, I cannot wait until Thanksgiving. I also cannot wait until Christmas Break. I am going to love being able to be home and not have to worry about doing anything. Everybody was glad to see me last night, although even this week I don't have a lot of time to spend down at the house, because I have three tests this week. Last night was a physics test that literally EVERYBODY in my class has been complaining about since taking it, but I didn't think it was bad at all, but I took physics and then AP physics in high school, so who knows.

 

41. Yesterday my friend sent me a link to a website. This website is a website where people go to make confessions of things that they have done anonymously. Some of the things that are posted are REALLY REALLY messed up, but I am pretty sure that over half of them are fake anyway. They are absolutely addicting to read. They kind of make you feel better about yourself and let you know that things could definitely be a lot worse for you. Once I started reading them I couldn't stop, it was ridiculous, I think I'm growing a weird addiction, but hey, I guess it could be a lot worse. It's not like it's unhealthy or anything, it is just like reading a book or a magazine, but they are all about people, kind of like reading lots of random blogs that are all anonymous.

 

40. I finally decided today that I am definitely quitting the fraternity. It has just been way too time consuming. I don't have enough time in my day every day to do everything that I have to do. I have been pulling 8 am to 8 pm days every day without being back in my room once. At the end of each day, the 10 minutes I finally get to myself have been amazing, and I'm tired of being forced to do something all day and being certain places at certain times all the time and being up late every single night and missing classes because of it. If I didn't have 8 mandatory study hours a week I would be able to finish pledging, but with the mandatory clocked-in study time, I don't think I can put up with everything for another few weeks, regardless of whether or not it makes somebody mad.

 

39. I was right about board the other night, it was pretty bad. We got screamed at for a good hour and a half, and then I had to walk home by myself because they sent me home because I have PT at 5 am on Monday mornings, and the rest of the pledges had to do a bunch of stuff. Completely worn out from homecoming last week, so glad that it is over. I can't possibly handle another week similar to last week, it might kill me. I've also been sick for 2 1/2 weeks now, hoping it's gone tomorrow, since I'm feeling better tonight. I will be incredibly happy once this semester is over, which reminds me, I get to schedule tomorrow, yay.

 

38. Tonight is going to be bad. Tonight we have midnight board. We did not have board last week, so we have two weeks' worth of being yelled at to make up for, so it is going to be long and loud and terrible. All of the pledges are sick as well, so screaming is going to be very difficult. We also were all supposed to get 8 different rundowns for this week, and I only actually got 5, and so did most of the other pledges, so we're going to get in a lot of trouble for that as well. Tonight I am expecting to be yelled at for at least 2 hours and then possibly being forced to do more cleaning, and then having to wake up at 5 am in the morning for PT after only 2 hours of sleep, not looking forward to it.

 

37. Monday. Monday... Monday. After a weekend of being sick. Weekends at college while being sick are absolutely terrible. They are not fun or enjoyable in any way. The good news is that it happened on a weekend when I had to take a standardized test on Sunday morning at 9 am anyway, so I wouldn't have been able to be out late on Saturday night, so being sick didn't interfere with my plans that much. I still did everything I do on typical weekends when I am not sick, I just felt pretty crappy while doing it. I mostly slept all day all weekend long. It felt good to get the extra sleep, but I felt even worse whenever I would wake up, knowing that I had wasted over half the day just by sleeping. I did get to sleep in this morning and miss PT at 5 am because I was sick, which was nice, because waking up at 5 am is usually pretty rough, and I was excused due to being sick. I think I would trade being sick for a whole weekend for going to PT at 5 am once just about anytime though.

 

36. Evaluative Argument:

http://www.collegian.psu.edu/archive/2005/10/10-24-05tdc/10-24-05dops-column-02.asp

This article is an evaluative argument that is against test preparation classes for standardized tests. The main argument being made is that it is not fair for people with more money to be able to pay to take classes that help them prepare for a test and do better on it, even if they are not as capable or as knowledgeable as some of the other people taking the test. A possible counter argument for that argument is that taking one of these classes is no different than hiring a tutor. Hiring a tutor would be no different than having a teacher in a regular class that would have taught you the knowledge in the first place and prepared you to take the test. The audience for the article is anybody who plans on taking any standardized tests and is debating taking test preparation classes or not.

 

35. Plagiarism:

Plagiarism, the one word that was dreaded in my high school. In high school, everybody had to take a research class and write a research paper that was at least 8 pages long and no more than 20. All the teacher talked about was plagiarism, it was the dreaded word. So what does plagiarism mean? In my high school, you were afraid you plagiarized something if you happened to verbally say something that somebody had said the day before. But really, plagiarism is using somebody else's ideas or thoughts and using and claiming them as your own without their permission and documenting that it was their ideas. For example, if you find a web site that has a very well-phrased way of writing what you need to say, if you copy and paste it and do not cite it, then you have plagiarized. If you use lyrics from a song and would simply put them in quotation marks without citing them properly, then you have plagiarized.

 

34. Evaluative argument:

http://www6.lexisnexis.com/publisher/EndUser?Action=UserDisplayFullDocument&orgId=574&docId=l:320033539&topicId=27011&start=1&topics=single

This article evaluates the supreme court justice candidate, Harriet Miers. It argues that she would be a good choice for the Republican party as she is against abortion. The counter-argument is that she is a lawyer first and not a typical Republican politician, so she might not be the best choice for a supreme court justice. Another argument is that she is a very conservative candidate, as she delivered 12 boxes of documents to help prove that she would not disappoint any of the Republicans who doubt her. A counter-argument is that she might still disagree with those Republicans on many issues, as she has never actually shown definite support for certain things or definite opposition to certain things having not been a politician.

 

33. Long day ahead of me. Did not realize how long this day was going to actually be when I slept in because I was sick. I have been sick for a couple days, and not getting a whole lot of sleep, so I decided to sleep in this morning and miss classes that they do not take roll in anyway. Sleeping in was a good idea. I feel many times better than I did last night after having gotten a sufficient amount of sleep. Anyway, sometime today before 5 pm and right now(11:30 am) I have to log 2 hours of study time, and then make it down to my fraternity and do my regular duties there as well as complete a "black mark" that we got on Sunday because apparently we haven't been doing our duties well enough, so that will take an extra hour or so. After I do that, I also have to either make it down to my economics class at 3:30 to hand in my homework or have somebody hand it in for me. Due to the fact that I will not have enough time in the day to hand it in myself, I think I'm just going to have somebody else hand it in for me. Although I can complete the black mark anytime before Sunday night, I have to do a community service thing tomorrow from 10-4, also as punishment for us not doing our duties well enough, and if I would wait until Sunday, they might get mad that I put it off that long.

 

32. Tired, very tired. Was up late Sunday night because I couldn't get to sleep and my roommate would not go to sleep either, which kept me up even later. On Monday I had to wake up at 5 am once again for PT. I had Sunday night board for my frat postponed until Monday night because they know that I have to get up at 5 on Mondays for ROTC, but it actually worked out worse for me, I realized. Instead of being totally exhausted for one day, I was exhausted for two days, as I had to wake up Monday morning at 5 after only a couple of hours of sleep and then was up until 3 am because we had to do a full house cleaning after midnight board and I didn't get back until about 2:30 am. This morning I had to wake up at 7 am for a physics lab which took a LOT longer than it should have because I was too tired to concentrate and my lab partners were not very intelligent. They insisted on getting % differences in the damn lab that were close to perfect because they didn't want to miss points. Meanwhile, the lab periods altogether are only worth a total of 10% of the final semester grade, and each lab is worth about 10 points, so missing one point, which we probably won't really miss anyway, doesn't affect our grades at all, but these guys still insisted on working and working until the lab period was over and then some more, at which point I left and went to my next class. I'd be willing to bet they still didn't solve what they did wrong in the problem, and I don't really care.

 

31. Stigmergy:

Guy Theraulaz and Eric Bonabeau described stigmergy:

 

Stigmergy is a class of mechanisms that mediate animal-animal interactions. Its introduction in 1959 by Pierre-Paul Grasse made it possible to explain what had been until then considered paradoxical observations. In an insect society individuals work as if they were alone while their collective activities appear to be coordinated. In this article we describe the history of stigmergy in the context of social insects and discuss the general properties of two distinct stigmergic mechanisms: quantitative stigmergy and qualitative stigmergy.

 

My remix of the definition of stigmergy is that there is a reason behind all of the ways that insects interact. There is a reason why worker bees go out and gather the honey all day. There is a reason why some bees have the job of dying for the hive or for the queen. There is a reason why the queen is the most valued and most important and is protected by all the other bees in the colony. Ant colonies work in the same way. Although they don't communicate between the species or maybe not even between their own colonies, they both work in similar ways, and those similar ways are stigmergy. They work those ways because it is necessary for them to survive.

 

clear indication of what is claimed. Clear indication of what the reason is.

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