You're Probably not Going to Get Hit by a Bus

"You know, some people say life is short, and that you could get hit by a bus at any moment and that you have to live each day like it's your last.

Bullshit.

Life is looong. You're probably not gonna get hit by a bus. And you're gonna have to live with the choices you make for the next fifty years."

- Chris Rock in I Think I Love My Wife

Few words have been spoken any truer.

On a brighter note, I'm finally doing better on my tests in college (got an A on my chem midterm). It just takes initiative - it's not even hard work, it's just studying.

College is Too Damn Hard

First order of business: I'm not going to complete that HP challenge that I talked about in the last blog.

Second order of business: College is too damn hard.

From kidnergarten to the end of high school academics came really easy for me. I got straight A's up until high school, when I started getting A's and B's in the IB program.

Now I'm in one of the top research universities in the world: UC San Diego. And I can't cope.

I've never had to be so self-motivated. When I was goign to elementary and junior high school, I would just study for tests the day before. In high school I rarely even studied in the first place - my teacher's were that good. But now, I'm in lecture halls of 300-500 students, with absolutely no one-on-one relationship with the professor. The discussion sections don't help either. It seems everything regarding college grades breaks down into 3 groups:

1. The graded assignments are taken directly from the homework or are rewordings of homework problems. This is like in my math class. If I do all the homework, I do damn well on the quizzes and tests. All the professor wants to know is: Can you do the problems?
2. The graded assignments require that you have a deep understanding of the material. This is my chemistry class. The teacher will teach a concept and assign homework, but the test will have problems that take what you learned and ask it in such a way that you've never seen before. This is ridiculously hard for me, because throughout my life, I've been tested as explained in the above group. I've never had to have a deep understanding - all I had to do was have an understanding. The professor wants to know: Can you extrapolate from the information I give you?
3. The graded assignments have nothing to do with what is lectured about in lectures or discussed about in discussion. This is my Humanities course. Technically, all I have to do is go to the website and find out what the essay will be about. Then I write it. Then my paper gets ripped apart because it isn't in the exact voice and style that the grader writes in (FYI, I wrote for my high school newspaper, I write for UCSD's newspaper, I got an A on my IB History of the Americas 4,000-word research paper, and received numerous other accollades that would define me as, at least, a decent writer). I don't even know what the goal of the professor is.

But these groups aren't the problem. I can cope with all three of these groups. The problem is, I've never needed the work ethic to do this. I've always been able to get by on my math tests without doing the homework (my math teacher was that good). I've never been required to read between the lines of chemistry (seriously now, we're just doing GE's here...). I've never been in a situation where I did not know what the professor wanted (give us a rubric or something so we know what you want from our essays).

So upon further introspection, I've concluded that these are the things I need to do in order to keep up with school work:

1. Do my homework the day the professor goes over it in lecture (Math).
2. Read the section in the textbook before the professor lectures about it in class (Math, Chemistry, and Humanities).
3. Ask the professor wtf he wants to see in hsi essays (Humanities).

I need the self-discipline to do this.

Currently Listening Thriller By Michael Jackson Baby Be Mine see related

HP Customer Support Sucks

I bought an HP m8100y Desktop PC to take with me to college. Wanna know what that is? It's the ultimate PC. The ultimate PC. It has a 3 GHz dual core processor, 2 gigs of memory, a 250 gig hard drive, a 512 MB GeForce 8500 video card, 8 USB ports, built-in wireless, 2 firewire ports, 4 memory card slots, a TV tuner, and analog inputs.

...

Analog inputs that I don't know how to use. For those of you who don't know what analog inputs are, these are analog inputs:

Yes, those colored little holes that say "VIDEO    L AUDIO R"

Every TV made today has analog inputs. What can I do with those, you ask? I can hook up many things to those. I can hook up a video game system, a VCR, a DVD player, a cable box, a camcorder, a camera, and many other things, and I would be able to play video games, view movies, view TV, view home movies, view pictures, and view a lot of other things on my TV. Logically, you would assume that I could hook up anything from the above list on my computer, since, as mentioned above, I have analog inputs on the front of my new HP PC.

See? On the right-hand side (your right-hand side, the computer's left-hand side), below the DVD drive, are those familiar little yellow, white, and red audio/video inputs.

Now, I'm in college, so naturally, I want to play some video games with my homies. The problem is, I don't know what to do after I hook up those inputs. There's no button on my PC that says "Video" or "Input" like on a TV that I can press in order to change the input.

Naturally I would want to call up HP customer support. And I did. Three times. Each one of them gave me three different solutions, none of which worked. So, here I am ranting about how much HP's customer support sucks. But no, this rant wouldn't be complete without some mockery-inducing, hard-evidenced experiments.

So here's the experiment. I will contact HP's customer support multiple times over the next few months, asking them the same question:

"Hi, I bought an HP m8100y desktop PC, and I would like to know how I can view videos through the analog inputs on the front of the computer."

And I will post their wildly different responses here. And upon the goal of encountering 15 different (and failed) solutions to one problem, I will officially announce that

HP'S CUSTOMER SUPPORT KNOWS NOTHING ABOUT HP PRODUCTS.

And I will bestow upon them the infamous "YOU KNOW NOTHING ABOUT YOUR OWN PRODUCT" award:

So, here it is, what you've all been waiting for, HP Customer Support's first "Way to Suck" example:

Theft

'When you kill a man, you steal a life,' Baba said.  'You steal his wife’s right to a husband, rob his children of a father.  When you tell a lie, you steal someone’s right to the truth.  When you cheat, you steal the right to fairness.  Do you see?'"

Some people have their rights to the truth and fairness stolen too many times. Too many god-forsaken times. People make me sick.

Currently Listening Minutes to Midnight By Linkin Park Valentine's Day see related

Political Labels are Stupid

I found this little skit on urbandictionary:

Bill: We should fight poverty.
Jim: Yeah, but you wouldn't know how, because you're a stupid pot-smoking hippie naive liberal.
Bill: Well you're a heartless selfish conservative, and I hate your views!
Jim: I hate your views too!
Bill: Well, I feel better about fighting poverty now.

Puts a lot in perspective.

Currently Listening Slippery When Wet By Bon Jovi Dead or Alive see related