So, I'm panicking. I've been searching for a roommate for the 2007-2008 school year for the past two months with no luck. If I don't find a roommate or manage to lease the entire apartment to someone else, I will be taking out a $5,100 loan to cover the cost, and also use a summer internship pay for the difference. Goodbye retirement savings for those years. Goodbye car.
It's tough because I'm leaving Ann Arbor in about 2 weeks, and won't be able to show the place in person to prospective tenants. I don't know how I'll be able to find a roommate while living 2,000 miles away in the summer.
What surprises me is that on campus housing is actually priced competitively with off campus deals. Accounting for the losses incurred in summer subleasing, and food/utilities costs, many dorms here are close to par with the apartments. If I'm thrifty (mainly by eating at home), I'd only save about $1,000 per year by living off campus. A grand isn't pocket change, but it's small compared to my total college expenses (about 4%) and far short of massive savings most upperclassmen expect. I wish I'd realized this before deciding to skip out on the dorms. I forgot how much subleasing an apartment for the summer can cost in the depressed apartment market.
Another round of Craigslist ads. Here goes nothing. At least I only have one final exam this semester.
So my Russian instructor thinks I lied about having an exam today at 6:00 PM in order to get out of class. He's definitely annoyed that I've missed one class per week for the last 3 weeks, but I've not used up my excused allowances for the course and have broken no rules. January/February is career season for engineering students, where companies hold info-sessions in the evenings that students should attend if they want a position; I'm an engineer, and Russian is my least important course. After explaining his doubt regarding my exam, because of the weird time etc., I told him plainly, "I could have you discuss that with my teacher if you'd like." The 2-hour exam was being held outside of normal class time because it's a graduate course with 1-hour lectures, and classroom is occupied right after our lectures. He got nervous and shut up then, and I left at 5:45 PM like I said I would. As I left, I heard "good luck on your exam" from one student sympathetic to my situation in the class. My russian is easily the worst, and the instructor is pretty unforgiving about it (the same student said "harsh" after the instructor tore apart my first translation in front of the class). I don't think my instructor has it out for me, but he's incredibly brusque and I struggle to take it impersonally. I guess I'm too used to the hyper-sensitive consideration of Americans, where offense is avoided at all costs. I still hate the guy though.
Bah, can't sleep. I had a short cappucino with almond syrup from Starbucks. Can't say it's as good as the Cafe Bach from Amer's though, which is just coffee + espresso + Torani almond syrup. The almond syrup at Starbucks is too fruity, and doesn't compliment the stale beans at all. Then again, what would?
Most of us know that it's wise to put symbols (like !, @ and ") in a password, assuming the system supports it (I've run into a few that don't). It can be troublesome to work in a lot of symbols though while making the password easy to remember. So I use equations as passwords, like this:
a^2 + b^2 = sin(pi/2) + 7!
(Spaces added for clarity, I type them without spaces.)
Who was your best (or worst) elementary school teacher?
Submitted by Minnow.
My best was Dr. Prudhomme in fifth grade. How about that, a PhD teaching grade school. We talked about computer games a bit, he was quite a geek. When he noticed that I didn't play much at recess, he cited some research tying athletics with academics so as to encourage me to play football with everyone else (hell no).
So after bitching to Google about the "Build Your Campus" contest a month ago, they want my help. I complained that the 10-person limit on teams was unfair to schools with over 300 buildings, since the contest required that all campus buildings be modeled for a valid entry. Apparently, the U of M Law Quad has been identified by the SketchUp team as a "signature structure" of the U.S., and so will be modeled in high detail and included in Google Earth. They need high-res photos of the building but don't want to fly up here, so they dug up my email and asked me to photograph and model it. I'm not being paid, but I miss this doing this stuff so much and hey, it's with Google. We all like Google.
I realize how little of my past I remember. Livejournal is kind of shitty; this seems like a much better place to document my insignificance.
