gator bait!

I made a huge blog post this morning on my phone, and i thought it posted! i made it while i was waiting in line for my football ticket, which i got and posted in my Flickr stream!

School is going alright, still tough but alright. I really need to stop procrastinating on my school work…it sucks studying the night before a quiz and feeling really rushed. i feel like it ruins the whole next day.

The football game this week was awesome, even though we lost. The day started relatively late, but it didn’t matter too much since it was a night game. A friend of mine knew someone  who had a tailgate on the north side of campus, so we went to check it out. Here’s the video of us there, with me explaining it!

The game was awesome too, i’ll put up a video of the typical game time fun stuff.

The week has certainly been quieter since the game, but i’m getting really excited for the next game, which is homecoming! Gator Growl is on friday night, and Aziz Ansari is headlining it. I think he’s a pretty funny guy from the little amount of his comedy that i have seen.

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The best part of this week would have to be the next video. The video is extremely short, but when done over and over again to unsuspecting fans of the other team, it works out well. The vuvuzela will be coming with us to all future tailgates. I am not a pro vuvuzela player, but i manage to get the notes out somewhat sort of close to almost near correct.

Last but not least, i set up a twitter account that i have been thinking about for quite a while over here. I’m reviewing the food in the dining center so that anyone who is following me will know if certain things are worth the wait, etc.

college/calculus

One of the worst parts of college is how it is advertised to high schoolers. No one ever tells high schoolers that college is seriously hard…not just fun and parties and ladies and fun and food and tv and video games and football and ladies and fun and fun and fun. College also includes really hard tests, 382938 hours of homework every single day, 3 hour classes/labs, and frat parties that no dude on campus is invited to.

It’s not that i’m not having fun, weekends rule. but during the week is pretty terrible. I’m pretty nervous about the fact that i’m having a lot of trouble with calc 2 and chem 1, and then next semester i have to throw physics into the mix. however, i’ve heard that calc 2 is harder than calc 3, and i already know some physics.

They also don’t advertise people being in your room watching tv at 1 am when you have a 725 class. most importantly, they don’t advertise all of the musical theater, history, etc. majors that have seemingly NOTHING to do at all times except have fun, go to parties, hang with ladies, eat, have fun, watch tv, play video games, have fun, and then occasionally read a chapter out of a musical theater book. Perfect example – there’s a musical theater major on my floor, and he’s always singing. How stressed can a dude be if he’s always singing and playing burnout in my room while i’m doing calculus?

I know that in the end all of this will pay off because i will have an AWESOME job designing AWESOME stuff like this:

Its just that the means are pretty terrible while they’re going down.

If any high schoolers are reading this, college is hard. You don’t just get a lot of work, you get the hardest problems in the section, and all of them. if there are problems 1-50, getting harder as they go on, you get 25-50 odd, 42, 44, 46, 48 and 50.

The one thing that possibly saves this week is the massive amount of chicken fried rice that i have in my room from my friend Kristina!!!!! nomnomnomnomnomnomnomnom

Also, i got one last birthday present from Julia, the new Ben Folds cd!

Also, there is a silver lining on the world’s darkest cloud that is struggling with chemistry and calculus: i got a 96 on my packaging test! w00t!

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I’ve also been doing a lot of thinking about calculus while i’m struggling with my problems. Why am i doing so many problems in calculus? my calculator can do every single one of them in milliseconds, and i spend about 3 minutes on the average problem. I do so many of the same exact problem just in a different form: what is the integral of 4x^2+3x+2/3x^3+14x^2+2, etc. Why do calc teachers not accept that calculators can do all of these problems, and instead give us problems that have these as the first steps? word problems where the first step is to take the integral of some massive function, and then use it to do deeper calculus. The work we’re doing now seems so mindless…its so complicated and so much algebra and all that. We never had a chapter on multiplying numbers like 29347298347*293472938479287. We just use our calculators! I don’t know, man.

Anyways, i should go to bed so i can wake up refreshed…to do more calculus.

birthday weekend!

I had a great birthday weekend, thanks to a bunch of different great people!

It all started on Friday afternoon…

I took a wonderful birthday nap Friday afternoon. Julia had been telling me for about a week that she had some wonderful birthday plans cooked up, so i was very excited when i woke up. It turns out that she did indeed have a very good plan. She got sushi delivered for me for my birthday dinner! after, we tried to go to a free movie, but it was way too packed so we went back to her dorm and then went to Mochi (the worlds greatest frozen yogurt place). I got taro yogurt with sour worms, blackberries and nerds.

Here are two videos of us at mochi; the first shows us getting our ice cream, the second shows the final results!

The next day at about noon, my parents and olivia arrived! we went to lunch at a place called New Deal Cafe which was very yummy. after, we went to the butterfly garden! here are some pictures from it:

here is a video from the butterfly garden!

These pictures were taken by my dad (my pictures were pretty fuzzy).

My mom hooked me up with some wonderful birthday treats as well as some other gifts, which were gobbled up very quickly. Also, my sister got my an incredible gift; it was really funny and full of a lot of jokes from our family.

I was really happy to see my family. I’m already getting excited to go home next weekend so i can spend more time with them.

After, i went to my first UF night game! it was a ton of fun…the only bad part about day games is how hot it is, and that was completely cured because it was a night game! Julia and I also split a couple of very tasty lemonades and some cracker jacks.

Here are some videos from the game!

Today, my nana and pop came to gainesville to visit me! We went to the dining center where we had a great breakfast, we went to the swamp, the union and we did a little walking tour of campus. I love taking my pop around so he can tell me what everything was like when he went to college at UF, and i love spending time with my nana!

glass rules

so i took my first chem test tonight. it was pretty draining…not that it was impossible, and not that it was super long, it was just 25 hard questions, one after another. I miss easy tests from high school. calc tests were easier, homework was easier, the problems were all easier too. Its not that i get so much more work during college, its that it’s also so much harder. Its all of the very hardest chem and calc problems, and like 3000 of them.

The good news, though, is that college is a lot of fun! I really like living with my roommates, being allowed to do whatever i want whenever i want and meeting new people.

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remember yesterday how i commented on the awesomeness of the dining centers? I would like to clarify that by adding in a couple of asterisks. The sandwich making people really frustrate me sometimes, only because i really like sandwiches. When someone squirts all of the mustard in the middle of the bread, it actually really really angers me. I never say anything, i think its just because i like sandwiches so much that it simply pains me to eat a non-great sandwich. The art of the sandwich is something im familiar with – it mainly has to do with spreading everything out. Somehow, the bad sandwich makers manage to stack about 20 banana peppers on top of each other in the middle of the sandwich, creating one very bananapeppery bite!

I only have one other problem with the dining center. I feel like they often try to make too complicated of foods, which end up not as good because they’re making a bunch of them. They can make some really good, really simple food – sandwiches, pizza, rotisserie chicken, etc. Its when they get into the roasted tilapia over wild spanish rice with chorizo and foie gras (not 100% literal) that things start to taste weird. Maybe i don’t have a great taste for real foods, but the best things they make are the simple things.

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For a couple of lectures in a row, we had a very very interesting guest speaker in my Principals of Packaging class. His name is Rick Bayer, and he’s the chairman of the academic sub-committee at the Glass Packaging Institute. I learned all about how glass is made, and why it’s so awesome. He said a lot of stuff that i really liked (“the plastic guys certainly couldn’t do this” “have you ever heard the phrase ‘this tastes like glass!’?”).

I will list a few of my very favorite facts that i learned below

• beer is 59% of the glass market
• glass is actually a liquid!
• when you recycle glass, the company uses less energy because it melts at a lower temperature than sand
• red glass is made using gold
• a glass furnace (the thing that melts the sand and shoots out globs of molten glass) never turns off and runs continuously for 10-14 years
• corked bottles fail 10% of the time
• a mold for an intricate glass bottle can cost up to $100,000!

I also stayed after class and asked him a bunch of questions. We talked about the Miller Lite Vortex Bottle, he told me what his favorite bottle is, and a bunch of other stuff that I can’t quite remember right now. I also got a free “Glass Recycling Week” tee shirt!

Anyways, this whole talk made me realize just how awesome glass is and how cool it would be to work for the company who came up with the Miller Lite Vortex bottle.

Here is a video we watched in glass describing the process of glass making:

really neat stuff!

tuesdays

Today was a typical tuesday.  tuesdays are always really annoying it seems. Mondays are mondays, right? right after the nice weekend, everyone feels crummy waking up so early. But tuesdays, tuesdays are much worse. its like…the week is kind of saying “yeah, i’m here to stay.” i don’t really know, i just don’t like tuesdays.

I got my football tickets! (you can see them in my flickr stream, brought to my blog by my awesome dad!) They’re pretty good, i’m really excited. especially since its a night game! and, its my birthday!

The rest of the day, however, was a typical tuesday. much much much studying for my chem test tomorrow, which will continue all day tomorrow. hopefully it will all pay off with a good grade!

i also would like to mention how nice the dining halls are. I had a very tasty breakfast of french toast with powdered sugar and syrup today…no tuesday is as bad with some french toast.

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Last night, i had my lost tribes/sunken continents class. My professor did some talking about global warming, and how he thought that it was obviously the truth. I don’t really know that much about the subject at all, but wouldn’t it be really really cool if it was actually all a conspiracy? what if al gore, obama, and all of the politicians indeed know that it’s fake. on one hand, its probably making them all money somehow; on the other hand, i’ve actually been thinking that it could really be a good thing.

Is there anything really that bad with people working to make the world a better place? Also, the whole global warming thing has created tons of jobs for americans! Nissan probably hired people to help create their new car, the Leaf. almost all car companies are coming out with new cars, which creates so many jobs! not just car people either, think about all of the things that go in cars!

interesting thoughts.

I really like this quote also, from Obama’s first State of the Union speech

“But even if you doubt the evidence, providing incentives for energy efficiency and clean energy are the right thing to do for our future – because the nation that leads the clean energy economy will be the nation that leads the global economy. And America must be that nation.” – Barack Obama

hmmmmm.

Also, i found this picture today that i really like:

hello world!

welcome to my blog, lifeatuf!

hopefully i’ll be able to keep this up, i really want to. I’ll use this blog to both inform and complain about my schooling experience, and i’ll also try to post pictures whenever i can. I’m still trying to figure out how to hook up a flickr stream to this blog so that I can post photos to this from my cell phone.

In general, school is cool so far.  It’s fun, but my classes are hard. i like hanging out with my friends…and then the people who are always in my room…even though they’re not our room mates…

but yeah, school is fun! i’m really excited about the football game this saturday, the first night game of the year! hopefully i’ll get great seats, i’m going to the ticket line super early tomorrow to get the best seats i can.

Question of the day (i dont plan on posting every day, much less a question every day): how far away does someone have to be in order for you to stop holding the door for them? does this change with stairs in the situation? i always have this situation where i end up holding the door for someone at the stairs, and then they end up jogging up about six stairs. if i stop holding the door for them, however, the door will close as they are about one stair away…such a dilemma.

i have about 58 hours of calculus homework to do, so i should go now.