Group projects, what a mess.

These types of assignments are the worst that you can get for a big project in school because you always find yourself coming across the issue of scheduling conflict. If you can all meet together it may only happen for one time, and that may not be enough time to be able to get anything done whether it's a simple research project or something artistic. It's also a chore trying to find one person who will able to get the whole group on task in order to do the project in a timely manner. If you can't get together you'll find yourselves scrambling to dived the work evenly amongst every person in the group. Once you do this it's also hard to collaborate and incorporate everything into the same overall presentation. It's especially hard to be able to do these types of projects when you are in college and you commute from an hour away while also having work on many weekdays and a full schedule while you're at school. Basically put it is near impossible for group projects to go smoothly and it's just a real pain and hassle when teachers assign them.

No eating allowed in lunch room!

Wow was I shocked today when I walked into the student lounge on the third floor of the music department at my college. There are signs hanging on the wall stating "no sleeping allowed in lunch room". First off, I'd like to say that though this is the lunch room it is more so a student lounge thanks to the computers and such. I don't understand just why it is that we're not allowed to take a minute to get some shuteye during our down time.

I pay 16,000 dollars a SEMESTER to go to this place, so why is it that they think they can dictate what I do during my free time between classes? Maybe I've had a full day of class followed by a full night of work the previous day and I didn't get much sleep. Maybe I had a lot of homework to do and I had to stay up late to finish it all and make sure I did a great job on all of it. Whatever the circumstance, I feel that I should be able to do whatever publicly appropriate act I please in the student lounge that I pay for.

The main thing that irritates me is that there's nothing they can do about it besides wake us up. They can't write us up or kick us out the building so what's the point of waking us up just to ensure we're not sleeping in the lounge?

I can understand not sleeping in here during lunch time when it's crowded and there are many students trying to eat here, but the rule is otherwise very unnecessary bullcrap.

Get busy working on looking busy.

Ugh, the ever bittersweet sting of a day at work where there's nothing to be done. You show up at 7 and you leave at 4 yet there is no work within this entire 9 hour stretch. Sure, you can pretend to look busy, but that takes more effort than actually doing work that has to be done. You could also try and find a place to just hang out and do nothing, but you'd better be prepared to go to it just in case somebody needs you or is just wondering where you've vanished to. Really, the only thing you can do on days like these is to find some tasks that are done often and do those even if they don't need to be done, and try to pass the rest of the time by working on something perhaps for yourself. If you can milk what you're doing and make things take longer than required you'll be able to pass the time a little faster, but it'll still creep by in the end, and I guarantee that you're going to be real tired of the job you're making a day out of. If you find yourself stuck in one of these situations I find that there are only two solutions no matter how you choose to enact them: don't show, or bring your coat, it's gonna be a long winter.

Diagnosing Hardware Problems

Yeah, I can't stand trying to figure out what's wrong with electronics sometimes. I have a Sega Genesis controller that for some reason refuses to work, and I have no idea what's wrong with it. I've tried cleaning the button contacts but it does nothing, so I have absolutely no idea what's wrong with it. That's not too bad compared to what else I have to look at. I had a computer that seemed to be broken. Turns out the sound card installed was preventing it from working properly. Now that everything else seems to work, neither xp or vista can format and install on the sata hard drive I have in it. Also, the 160 gig EIDE hard drive is creating the same problem the sound card was making and preventing it from running. The next step it to take an already working hard drive with an operating system and put it in this computer and see if it works, if not I will know that the computer is no longer a viable machine. Diagnosing Computer Hardware is extremely irritating and I hate it.