New Home

My blog has a new home at www.markwatson.us. Sorry I couldn’t redirect you there automagically; you will just have to use the link for now. I have moved all the posts and comments over, so nothing is lost. Hope you enjoy my blog’s new home!

Finals

It’s that time of year for finals. I never really understood finals till I took community college classes. Sure, I had talked to people who mentioned in a slow, exasperated voice how hard their finals were going to be. My canned response was always “finals? just do them next week.” Then I took some community college classes and got a real view of finals. It happened at the end of last semester; I realized college finals are different than homeschool finals. To illustrate what I learned, let’s analyze a typical homeschooler. He is 17, wears jeans with his shirt tucked in and his hair parted neatly and can always be seen wearing an old pair of tennis shoes. He is generally a literature nerd; he’s really good a literature related subjects, but is still in Saxon algebra 1/2. We’ll name him Joe. Joe’s thought process for his homeschool finals generally go like this*:

Monday: I have finals on Friday. I better study.
Tuesday: I still have finals. I really better study.
Wednesday: Ok now I seriously have to study. I better stop reading Shakespeare and Dickens and actually read those selections of Shakespeare and Dickens plus memorize the answers to those questions from my Abeka lit book.
Thursday: OK, now I seriously need to work on studying for finals. However this book really interesting, and I have some research to get done before debate club. Plus I have a few speeches to polish. Finals can wait.
Friday: Finals are today. I haven’t studied for them. Oh well, I can always do them next week. It’s not like they are going anywhere.

Joe now decides to take some community college classes to get some extra credits out of the way before college. Here’s how his first finals go:
Monday: I have finals this week. I had better study.
Tuesday: I have finals this week. I really better study.
Wednesday: Ok, so now I have to study. I better get to that. But first I need to cut some abolish cards and actually print out my caveats brief.
Thursday: The test is today. I should have studied. (Joe takes the test and aces it anyway)

After I took my first final I changed my basic response to my school-going friends complaining about their finals. Instead of saying “finals? just do them next week.”, I now say “finals? darn, that sucks. good luck.” Needless to say I now have a new respect for finals. To be sure they aren’t that hard, but they are definitely stressful due the fact that they just happen – they don’t wait for you.

So it took me this entire post to tell you I am in finals week. I probably won’t be updating much, and please wish me luck!

*Joe is a typical homeschooler and does not represent all homeschoolers. Some other homeschoolers, particularly the ones with very organized parents, simply have finals on friday, study for them over the week before, and then take them on Friday and get “A”s. It’s not slightly sickening.

Raining

It’s raining now and about 47º outside. It’s really nice weather considering the past few days and the snow on Friday. I love being able to walk out of school at 10p.m. and only need a jacket because of the rain, and not the coldness. It feels nice to know summer is approaching and with it warmer weather. Snow is nice, but it just doesn’t cut it in terms of comfort level.

Anyway, this post is random, but I was excited about the rain so I had to post it.

Music

I decided to follow Lydia’s example and post some random songs I have been listening to. Of course my list is not nearly as organized as hers. I know some bloggers have a section in their blog that displays little album covers of their favorite albums. Unfortunately I’m not that creative or talented, hence this post. Feel free to insult my musical tastes in the comments section. Also, this is not organized or comprehensive, just some random songs I like.

• Burn Out Bright -Switchfoot. This is a really good song. The beat is catchy, and the lyrics are good.
• American Dream -Switchfoot. This song by Switchfoot has a catchy beat as well. And the lyrics are pretty good.
• Momentum -Toby Mac. This song is a little heavy and it’s lyrics are weak, but is a catchy song.
• Dare You to Move -Switchfoot. A classic.
• Who I Am Hates Who I’ve Been -Relient K. I don’t have much Relient K, but this song is pretty good. The lyrics are interesting if you stop and anylize them.
• Another One Bites the Dust -Queen. Yes they are a gay band. Yes they are an old band. This song is pretty good though. I don’t agree with the lyrics though. Of course you also have to listen to the Weird Al version “another one rides the bus” as well.
• Message in a Bottle -The Police. Don’t make fun of me. They did write some good music. And I don’t usually listen to old stuff, only sometimes.
• Barely Listening -Pilot Speed. I don’t know what to think of the lyrics, but the song is catchy. It’s an iTunes freebie, if you haven’t guessed.
• Noticed -Mute Math. A pretty good song.
• Dead Man (Carry Me) -Jars of Clay. The new Jars of Clay stuff is more rock type. I like it – I didn’t really like their old stuff.
• Revolutionary -Chopin. This song is amazing. I wish I could play it on the piano.
• Lifesong -Casting Crowns. The lyrics are good.
• Elanor Rigby -The Beatles. This song is old, but pretty good. The lyrics are interesting to say the least.
• Daloula -A random arabic artist. It’s an interesting song, you can listen to it on my box.net account. It is called something like “ta3la we 7a…”. Tell me what you think .

Box.net

I’m going to break from the normal flow of posts to mention a new website I discovered called Box.net. Box.net is kind of like a social file sharing service. Basically you get 1gb of free space (non-nerds read: plenty of space) to post your files. You can then make them public to share them with other people, such as your friends. Of course you can also share them with complete strangers and form intimate and life long relationships as a result, but I strongly would recommend not doing that. Or you can not share the files and just leave them on the site. This akin to putting your bank account records on someone else’s porch because you ran out of room in your house or were afraid of loosing them due to fire damage. On that note I created an account for myself at public.box.net/hazynotions. Feel free to go check it out. I uploaded some random music I like (only the stuff I didn’t buy on iTunes, so it is slightly sparse). I also added some cool debate evidence for NATO year, if you are a debater. None of the evidence is particularly good as I am not officially debating this year and so I haven’t really done much research. But please enjoy it, nonetheless.

The Box.net service actually quite nice. They have a fast interface, and it is easy to upload many files at once. If you sign up for an account as a result of this post, use the referral code “gullible”. Just kidding. I would never stoop to such lows as to turn this blog into a corporate advertising machine. But if you do sign up for an account, send my the url; I would be very happy look over all of your personal files that you upload. It will help my self esteem to know that others also think up stupid things and systematically file them in Word documents :p (That’s “TextEdit” documents, for you Mac users). Or you could just upload music and we could get a sort of Kazaa thing going. And then just wait ’till the feds shut us down.

Languages

I was doing Arabic homework the other day when it hit me how complex languages are. Just take a moment to compare languages to math, for example. In math basically there are formulas you have to memorize, but the basic concept of problem solving is the same throughout. If you need to solve a massive math problem, you just take it one step at a time. Languages on the other hand are like complex machinery, they have tons of rules and everything has to be correct or else it will sound funny. And that’s not even to mention the exceptions to the rule. If I had leaned Arabic as a native speaker I would be able to easily navigate the complications without even putting forth a thought in my head. But learning it as a second language is quite hard because of these complexities.

When I first started learning Arabic it was really confusing. The characters are written backwards and I didn’t know how to say anything (actually not much has changed in the latter regard). After I completed one semester I got more used to the language. I almost thought it was simple. Just memorize some words, learn how to conjugate a few verbs, and I can talk, right? Then the class moved on and we learned a whole new grammatical structure to convey superlative, and everything got complex again. Now I need to learn how to be able to effectively use this new structure I just learned. And that’s not the last new thing I will learn, for sure. A language, it seems, is not just learning some new words, but a whole new complex structure to arrange thoughts.

When I look at a block of arabic text it still looks like just a bunch of squiggly patterns; until I look closer and try to figure out what they mean. I am looking forward to eventually being able to actually communicate using it. To being able to successfully navigate the complexities of the language — but I would settle just for an “A” this semester .

Library

I’m sitting in the library at my institution and am very surprised to see people actually looking at books. Most of people are, of course, using the computers or talking on their cell phones, but there is the odd person sitting down and thumbing through the pages of a musty history book or interesting novel. They are apparently researching for class projects. Well, at least I assume they are researching — they may just be trying to look cool in the library. You know, the scholarly type, all looking at books and appearing to get more non-wikipedia type information. Working on the “I get print information” image. It seems retro or even classy, maybe. I guess I should try it, instead of sitting at my MacBook and writing on my blog about it.

*goes off and looks at books*

My bro’s site

My brother just made a website using Google Pages. At first he really liked it and said it was really easy to use. Later, after it took him all of a minute to edit one link, he took back the easy-to-use part. I still think it’s pretty easy to publish a site with Google Pages, though — no worrying about hosting, files, etc.

His site is really cool. Check out the photos section, he has some great photos up.

Term papers

I never really knew how hard writing term papers was until I started a history class in college. The first day of class I sat down quite excited to be learning under my new and apparently very cool teacher. He had an awesome southern accent — not the redneck kind of southern accent, but a cool Virginianish accent. The first stapled bunch of papers he passed out was a term paper assignment. I didn’t really know what I was in for at the time. Now a normal, garden variety research paper probably wouldn’t have been so bad. But this was not a normal, garden variety research paper. This was a term paper made by a professor intent on forcing all but the most hard working students to drop his class for fear of getting an F down on the transcript.

The first warning of the difficulties that lie ahead was the fact that we could turn the paper in as many times as we wished, and he would have it back to us the next class period entirely marked up. And he wouldn’t record any grade until we turned it the last day of class. He obviously didn’t expect anyone to get it at the first try. The other problem was that this was a term paper, and apparently term papers are harder than other types of papers. With term papers one is given the whole term, so one thinks that he has plenty of time to get it done. Papers that have, say, a two week deadline generally instill panic in the student, and so he gets it done ASAP (ASAP meaning the night before while high on caffeine). Term papers don’t instill this fear. They have more of a “sure it’s a hard paper, but I have the whole bloody semester to get it done, don’t I?” kind of feeling. So rather than doing the paper ASAP (the night before while high on caffeine), students will generally do it the morning before the class while really high on caffeine (think Redbulls. many.) This is not to mention, of course, that term papers are generally deceivingly difficult papers because they are of the “term” variety, meaning they are generally longer and consist of many more primary sources than you or I would care to know existed.

So I get my term paper assignment and quickly shove it into my folder, eager to get it away from me. I feel less guilty with not doing the paper when the assignment does not sit at the desk and stare back at me for long periods of time. In my mind I said “I’ll get to it later. I have other important things to do right now. Like playing games. And listening to music. After all, I have the whole bloody semester to do it.” And of course I didn’t touch it till now, when I have three or four weeks left in the class to finish it. And even then I still take my time researching it. After all I have a whole bloody 3 weeks to get it done, right?

The new blog strategy

When planning a successful prank call one always needs a good strategy; a winning strategy. The same thing is true with blogging. (I’m trying to sound so refined and professional right about now, so just play along). Hence forth I am revisiting my grand blogging strategy.

Blogging and websites have always been an obsession with me. I always have more online websites and blogs then I really need. I’m like a miser of blogs, sitting in my little castle collecting them one by one, but rarely posting anything on them. To remidy this sad state I have decided to come up with a uniform strategy for my blogging. It is this: My blog “markwatson.wordpress.com” shall be my random personal blog. I can post anything there, including, but not limited to my random thoughts about cat pictures. My more professional blog “hazynotions.com” will be my more presfessional blog which I will post tech stuff such as PHP code, buisness ideas, and world domination plots. You know, serious stuff. And finally my tumble log “tumble.hazynotions.com” will be for random scrabook like stuff. Very random, and I sugest you never visit it as you will be the better for not having ever seen it. All other blogs will be retired and given a sizeable pension which includes free lemonade for life.

So that is my grand blogging strategy. I hope it works. A best case scenario is that I succsefully blog until I am 85 years old and then pass on my succsesfull blogs to my children who will then run them into the dust. A worst case scenerio is that I don’t post anything else after this get run over by a bus seconds before a nuclear holocaust. So you can see either way it would be a better situation than it is right now.

P.S: I am double posting this over both hazynotions.com and markwatson.wordpress.com.

Convergance of blogs

Sometimes there is a trail in a forest that splits into two trails and then later joins back into one. That’s what I am doing with my blogs. I originally had one blog, but then later split it into two blogs and now I am moving back to one blog. The reason is that it simpler to just update one blog. So I am going to use my other blog, railsdesign.com, as my primary blog and will retire this one.

Summary: I am no longer going to post to this blog, but to my other one at railsdesign.com.

Quotes

Here's a good joke to do during an earthquake: Straddle a big crack in the ground, and if it opens wider, go "Whoa! Whoa!" and flail your arms around, like you're going to fall in.

- Jack Handey

 

If you ever drop your keys into a river of molten lava, let'em go, because, man, they're gone.

- Jack Handey

 

Home is important. It's important to have a home.

- George W. Bush (no I'm not a Bush-hater. It's just a funny quote)

 

 

Must. find. something. better. to. blog. about. 

Cool Pictures

I found some cool pictures of sidewalk painting here.

Free debate evidence

I am finally done debating. It's been fun but I'm glad to be done. For all those still debating or going to nats here is my debate evidence. Enjoy!

A zip file of all the evidence (60Kb)

Or individually:

Loser Pays Neg (24.5Kb)

Myths of MML (26.5Kb)

Health Courts Neg (70.0Kb)

Informed Consent Neg (73.0Kb)

NPDB Neg (56.0Kb)

SQ is Good (20.5Kb)