2001

Canon EOS Rebel 2000

Here’s a picture of my new baby. I’ve already been experimenting with the camera and I’m getting pretty good with it. It has a ton of features, and I especially like being able to play with the ISO film speed as well as the aperture and shutter speed. Good stuff. The camera has dual automatic and manual focus modes, which is a plus. I will definitely take a lot of campus shots with this baby. I highly recommend it.

I got a lot of other great stuff as well. My parents got me a sharp looking outfit from Banana Republic, including new khakis pants, which I needed desperately. I got some other nice clothes also. My floormates, namely Mark and Suzanne, hooked me up with some decent stuff too! Wow this was a great Christmas.

Here at the Steinbaugh residence it was a really quiet one, with just the family celebrating the holiday. It was nice, and dinner was really laid back.

I’m still not ready to go back to school though…yet.

The jolly fat man in a red suit has been tracked by a non-profit United States government outfit since 1954. Do you doubt his existence? Well, be sure to visit the NORAD Santa Sighting Project before you make such a claim. Merry Christmas to all!

Is it good to be home! For the first time, I get a lovely three week vacation with absolutely no school attached. No papers, no books, no fear! High school was never like this. I’m definitely never going back. As of now, I have only tenative plans, including hanging out with some of my friends, especially Will, who wants to trade CD’s. Maybe I’ll get around to seeing Evan, Sung, and my numerous other Mill Valley buddies. I might even take Howard, one of my floormates (he lives in the lounge) on a tour of San Francisco. He’s staying at the Chinatown Holiday Inn. So hopefully that will be cool.

Also, a big thanks goes out to Quinn, my roommate, for saving my butt. He’s mailing me back something I forgot in my room that I need.

Happy Holidays everyone!

Finals are the hardest academic experience I have ever been through. I had them nicely spaced out, with at least a two-day interval between each of them, and I was still sweating it. To compare, some of my friends on campus had two finals on one day, and they got an hour of sleep before. I slept like a baby before my finals, getting at least eight hours. It can be tough to physically sleep before a final, with all the stress, but I was at least in bed for eight to nine hours every time. Be sure to get your sleep — I seriously think it paid off when I needed some extra thought power during my tests. Of course you can cram, think you know everything, and get an hour of sleep. Then you will go to your test, the professor will throw something new at you, exactly like my chemistry professor, and you will have no clue how to do it because you can’t use an algorithm to solve it.

That’s exactly my point. No matter how much you read concepts in a book, some tests will hit you with material that you haven’t seen. It’s just not possible to know everything. You just have to know how to do everything. That’s extremely difficult on a test. For example, also during chemistry, I got stuck looking at a combustion reaction that I didn’t know how to solve for over thirty minutes. I kept plowing through and I think I finally got it. It was a good feeling, but I know that if I had been drained, with no sleep, I wouldn’t have known how to do it.

Sleep is not as important as knowing the basic concepts, of course. I didn’t put anything off for my test, so I didn’t have that problem. However, one of my floormates didn’t do any of his statistics for the entire year, and he crammed from 12 PM-12 AM before his final. That would take it out of you.

Just keep up on the work and you’ll do fine. I think I did.

Well, Quinn and I got into an arguement earlier this week over a number of things. I’m writing about this now because I think we’re back to being able to talk to each other. First, I asked him about some mysterious phone numbers and he got really defensive. I now know to never do something like that again. Second, he yelled at me for being too loud one night. In fact, it wasn’t me being loud at all. He really got mad at Nancy, which was not fair at all. She had some of her math papers in my room and had to get them out. She was really quiet about it and honestly, Quinn didn’t act in a responsible manner.

We got into a verbal grudge match at night, where Quinn simply lost it. For the sake of decency, I will omit the swear words from the weblog, but let’s just say that there were plenty thrown about. I told him that if he says something like that to me again, he will regret it. That really made things tough.

However, I got mad myself when he woke me up twice during the night before my final. At school, you can close the door and have it stay partially open by extending the deadbolt from the door. Well he did that but let the door slam twice. No man can sleep through that.

Anyway, I believe we have resolved our conflict. We had breakfast together this morning and talked about the holidays, including the Chinese New Year. Things are looking up, I think.

Well I had my math final yesterday, and it was quite an experience. I was amazed at how much time I had during the test. It really isn’t like a midterm at all, which is nice. During a midterm, you have to scramble to get your answers down because you simply don’t have enough time to play with the problems. In math, you need to experiment with solutions because that is the only way to solve them. So, I was really thankful for the large block of time. Three hours is almost excessive, since I only really used two of the hours to write down my work. The last hour I spent checking. Here’s hoping that I did well…

Today for my GE60A 1960s history class, I was required to go watch the Graduate at the Northwest Campus Auditorium. The auditorium is like a mini-theater. I have been there many times for history movies, but this is the first movie I am actually writing about.

The movie was excellent. Benjamin Braddock, played by Dustin Hoffman, ends up having an affair with a woman named Mrs. Robinson, the wife of his father’s business partner. Inevitably, Ben falls in love with Mrs. Robinson’s dauther, Elaine. Elaine leans of Ben’s secret affair with her mother through Ben himself. However, her mother manipulates the story afterwards so that it appears to her that Ben raped her mother. Elaine naturally grows to detest Benjamin.

Elaine is a student at UC Berkeley. Benjamin decides one day that he is destined to marry Elaine. He even tells his parents. Shortly after, he drives up to Berkeley in an attempt to propose to her. He ends up repeating this proposal what seems as daily. Elaine admits that she is engaged to another man, Carl Smith. The two have a wedding ceremony in Santa Barabara.

In the conclusion, Ben drives down to Santa Barbara from Berkeley and stops the wedding by shouting her name from behind a large class window at the back of the church. Elaine shouts, “Ben!,” runs away from the ceremony at her parents’ distgust and hops a bus with Ben toward happiness.

The end.

It was an awesome movie! I even noticed that in Wayne’s World II they spoof the ending of this movie. Definitely a film classic. Go rent it.

I’m already read for some vacation. While Christmas break is two weeks away, I feel the holiday season coming on. Most of the spirit is from the stores, with their Christmas sales already in full swing. Nothing like good old commercialism. Last week, the week after Thanksgiving, came and went extremely quickly. I was amazed. This week is flying by as well. That I am not so happy about. I really need to start studying…and stop weblogging…for the time being.

I decided over the weekend that I needed more hard disk space. 140GB of storage just wasn’t doing the trick. I then proceeded to go to Best Buy, where I thought I was going to buy 60 GB more. The idea was simple: buy a cheap 60 GB EIDE drive, pop it in my computer, and I’m ready to go. However, I noticed a great deal in the store. Best Buy had priced the 60 GB hard drives at $170. The 80 GB was priced at $250. And low and behold, the 120 GB was priced at $200! The specs were the same on every hard drive. I thought that maybe it was defective, but then again I can always return it. So I took the chance and bought the drive. It works like magic. I got it installed and partitioned in about half an hour. Now I have 260 GB of storage. Joy.

Well well well, Week 10 has finally arrived. It’s the devil in disguise. I’m convinced of it. Why do I say that? Well, first off, we all know that Week 10 means the end of the quarter! NO MORE SCHOOL! BUT it also signifies that finals are only ONE WEEK away, AND the dorm is under a 22 hour Quiet Hours lock-down. Nathan, our wonderfully lax RA, has threatened to write people up for once without so much as a minor warning. ::sigh:: Week 10 also means all term papers are due (maybe I should start mine soon), projects to wrap up (I really should start that chem project), and finals to study for (I guess that can wait til Sunday…). So yes, people are starting to stress out completely…I’m not sure how to handle this anymore! Thank god for MP3s and WinAmp…I can listen to wondefully peppy Christmas tunes and think of the days until I return to good ol’ PA…well, the state’s not that great, but I get to go home and see my friends! But how ’bout I pass my courses first? “I’m dreaming of a White Christmas/Just like the ones I used to know…” Right…I should stop procrastinating and get back to this last math assignment so I can have the rest of the week to do the paper and chem project. To all you Bruins out there: GOOD LUCK!