The Zooniverse

After a short 4 day vacation with my family to Quebec City, I’m back at work. I guess it wasn’t really a vacation since I’m already on summer break which is a vacation, but at least I wasn’t at work. In case you’re wondering, family vacations now that I’m 20 aren’t what they used to be when I was 10 or 12. Now they’re stressful and there’s lots of arguing over what to do. Once you turn 18 or get to college, when you go away somewhere it seems like the goal is to go with your friends and drink a lot. What a country we live in!

Quebec City is quite the place, everything is in French and people assume you speak French, which gets annoying after a while. After 4 days it was nice to turn on the radio and not hear crazy gibberish or questionable French pop music. There was a huge amount of public drinking going on in the city, which I have been told is similar to what its like in Europe. Young people were walking around carrying cases of beer, drinking in the streets. Before we left I went into a convenience store and bought two huge cans of Labatte Blue (Bleu). These cans were comically large and I felt like a total badass drinking them.

When I got home this summer I had a strong urge to get back into PC games. After a year of only playing console games, I really wanted to play some of the good PC games that had come out. 90$ worth of video card later, I can now play most modern games, a first for me since my computers are usually out of date. I played through Bioshock which was incredible and by far one of the best shooters I’ve every played and I wanted to move on to Mass Effect. I’m not a huge fan of RPGs but this one takes place in space, and you can use lots of guns. Those are two things which will definitely hold my interest, but of course the gaming gods are not working in my favor. Although I surpass the minimum system requirements, the game gives me weird errors and crashes. It turns out lots of people are having the same problem, but BioWare has yet to release a patch. Get on it! I need to play this game! Until then I guess I’ll get into Unreal Tournament 2004 which has been sitting on my hard drive for quite sometime. I’m a geek!

Don't mess.

Friday is the 4th of July, and like every other patriotic American I will be celebrating the birth of our nation, hopefully with a cold beverage in hand. Last week I watched the new ABC show Wipeout. It looked like an Americanized version of Ninja Warrior, one of the greatest shows I’ve ever seen. While the show is similar, it fails to entertain or impress. The contestants on Ninja Warrior are usually skinny, fit Japanese people, sometimes Olympic athletes, and in general people who can run/jump. They take the show seriously and  some even build Ninja Warrior courses in their yards to practice. The contestants on Wipeout are Americans, sometimes overweight and certainly not athletic. There nothing impressive about seeing some chubby 40 something mom fall in mud repeatedly, after watching Ninja Warrior, its kind of embarrassing. Other than the obvious physical fitness differences, Wipeout makes things way easier. The first obstacle is a Ninja Warrior like obstacle course, but if the contestants fall into the water, they can climb back up and keep going. What!!??

This is crazy, anyone can finish the course if they can just climb back on after they fall off the obstacles. It just comes down to how fast they can do it. In in Ninja Warrior the contestants need skill and sometimes no one even finishes the course. Everyone finishes in Wipeout. Lame. The first and last challenges in the show are like this, the ones in between apparently change week to week. Wipeout could be sweet but instead its just like every other American reality show, they have lots of hot/dumb blonds and really ripped guys with a few old people thrown in the mix. Personally I don’t give a crap about the people, I want to see people conquer a crazy hard obstacle course - that’s why I’ll continue watching Ninja Warrior. The goal in Ninja Warrior is to achieve total victory, it doesn’t get more epic than that. Wipeout instead has some jackass commentators who constantly crack lame jokes and draw funny words on the screen like John Madden. Ha. Ha. The people on Ninja Warrior could school everyone on Wipeout with their eyes closed. Long live Ninja Warrior!

My scanner woes continue here at work. Its finally Friday and hopefully the last Friday I’ll be working for a while. As a growing young adult i need Fridays to sit around in my house and play loud 90s rap music. The issues with the scanner are really fascinating, when I’m scanning a folder with 200 pages it won’t jam once. When I’m scanning one with 3 or 4 sometimes it jams on every page. Its frustrating and i realize I’ve been talking to the scanner quite a big. Since I’m in a big room and no one is around, I’ve started talking to the scanner. Usually i only talk to it when its not working, but all the same I hope no one overhears it. So far the scanner has not responded to my pleas to work properly and not rip pages in half or get stuck inside the inner workings of itself.

Evaluations Scanned: 10,608

If you’re a fan of Lost, last nights episode was probably the best season finale yet. People died, islands moved, and caskets were opened.

I’m going to eat a granola bar.

Its hard to believe that ive only been home for 5 days and im already back at work. I do live a high profile, expensive lifestyle, so making a few dollars more than minimum wage is necessary as soon as possible.

Life at the office still revolves around me scanning teacher evaluations into the computer. This summer it seems the scanner has decided to get paper jams every 20 pages which is not fun. If this keeps up this scanner will end up with the same fate my printer from school did.

Nothing would make me happier than bringing the scanner out to the middle of CommAve and letting angry Boston traffic run it over. Until then, happy trails.

Evaluations Scanned: 1137

I don’t watch much TV, other than LOST and 24. If I am watching TV its usually HBO or IFC, and recently i have noticed a disturbing trend in what I actually watch. If I’m flipping through the channels and happen to stumble upon a documentary, I will watch all of it regardless of how far in i see it, or what its about. In the last few months I’ve watched two documentaries about The presidential election in 2004 …So Goes the Nation, and  Hacking Democracy.  I’ve seen Year of the Yao twice now, which is about super-tall Chinese NBA player Yao Ming. The Fog of War, which was about former Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara. Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price, about Wal-Mart’s questionable business practices.

All of these were pretty good, but one stood out as being the craziest documentary I’ve ever seen: Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr. This was about Fred Leuchter, who designed and repaired electric chairs, lethal injection systems and other devices used execute criminals. In the 1980’s he was approached by a German man who was on trial in Canada for distributing pamphlets stating that the Holocaust never happened. Leuchter ends up going to Germany and investigating the actually ruins of the concentration camps to see if it happened or not. He ends up releasing a report known as the Leuchter Report and becomes a well-known Holocaust denier. This documentary is chock full of crazy, from what he actually did in Germany to the fact that there are that many people who believe the Holocaust didn’t happen. I would definitely recommend seeing this, since it has many moments where you want to yell, “Are you kidding me!?” at what Leuchter does and says.

I feel that lots of people find documentaries boring, there is no real action, just talking and interviews. I still find them interesting and can’t stop watching them once I start. I think someday I’ll make a documentary about documentaries called, The Documentary Documentary.

Ok i haven’t updated this blog in 2 months or something, its not my fault though. Due to a series of unfortunate events, I was unable to type. I spilled delicious DC coffee on my keyboard and had to wait for a replacement. I know it may sound like a minor inconvenience to not have a keyboard for a few days, but let me tell you as a superhuman PC user like myself, it was a serious problem. I kept trying to type on it even though i knew it wouldn’t work, it was like a cruel joke.

Recently i have been noticing lots of tour groups on campus. These are not little 10 person tour groups being led around campus, these are huge 40 person groups, filled with parents and prospective students staring at the library while I’m trying to get to class. I cant believe how big the groups are, its possible to see them from across campus they are so big. I am proposing a new system of leading tours here at UMass: just put them on a damn bus. There are loads of buses going around campus all the time, just stick them on a bus! The campus is big enough to allow for a bus tour, plus they would see much more of campus. I remember going on tours at UMass and seeing the middle of campus then a fake dorm room in Northeast. Oh boy, a fake dorm room. Maybe our new president or basketball coach will improve the tours. Until then please stop walking so slowly around campus, or I will crash into you on my bike.

Music of April: David Bowie - Low

Well its been a while, with all the violence on campus recently I was somewhat hesitant that anything in my newest post would cause me bodily harm. Because of this i have not posted anything for a week or something. While the violence is written about in the Collegian and even in the Boston Globe, I have yet to see one violent incident. The most violent thing I’ve seen in the last month was people tumbling down the hill due to all the ice that accumulates after it snows. Therefore I believe that the violence on campus is a hoax by the university to mask the real reason people are getting hurt: poor snow removal by the University. Lets face it, the Universities main solution to getting rid of snow/ice/rice is spraying sticky, stinky soy sauce all over the place. (Ok it might not just be soy sauce but it is brown and stinks) They even sprayed this morning and the sun is still out! Since the University is so bad at plowing/salting/shoveling/providing decent lunch at the DC, they have invented a “wave of violence”as an excuse for people falling down on the ice . I know this might be hard to believe as some people have been stabbed/beaten with lacrosse sticks, but I’m positive that if we dig deeper into these cases we will find Jack Frost was really to blame, and the University just does not have an answer to his weather trickery.

I will also predict that once spring arrives, this crime wave will end and the birds and squirrels and opossums will emerge once again from their winter hibernation to beautify the campus and make everyone happy. Until then keep a sharp eye out for ice and don’t become a victim of the University’s dirty dealings.

Not a whole lot of activity here in the Zooniverse lately, is it a lack of things write about? is it the crappy weather? am I actually doing work at school? I can’t be certain what the reason is but until I have something to write about here’s an image I created for my Electro Synth-Pop band the JDinos.

Sorry this picture looks so bad, I don’t feel like resizing to make it look normal.

Also about 15 minutes ago, the fish that my roommate had bought just a few weeks ago has died. Sir Duke, age unknown, was a blue Beta fish who enjoyed swimming around the plastic plant in his tank. Although the death was sudden, no foul play has been suspected. Hopefully Sir Duke is in a better place than 302 Field.

After an eventful weekend, its back to going to class.

But before thinking about academic issues, one should first sit back and play some games on the internet. By games on the internet I’m talking about Off-Road Velociraptor Safari. The premise of this game is to kill as many Velociraptors as possible in the alloted time. Using a jeep with a strange “spiked capturing ball” dragging behind, the goal is to run over the Velociraptors then pick them up with the ball and drag them into transporters to send them into the future where they will be used as snacks. Yeah, thats some crazy stuff, definitely JDinos approved since it not only deals with dinosaurs, but also time travel.

After a long (too long) winter break, I’m back at the University to prepare for my future career in something. Not much action took place over this break, the most exciting thing was probably a few rogue deer sightings in Pelham and my purchase of the Holga camera.

Now that I’ve gone to all my classes I feel that I can classify them into different categories.

Computer Literacy 
This class falls into the category of “Non Interesting Science Class.” This category is for science classes that are extremely boring or present so much information that one simply does not pay attention. Computer literacy is in this category since I feel pretty confidant about by ability to use computers and I probably won’t pay attention while I’m sitting in this class. Last year I was in an Astronomy class which also fell into this category. While I should have been paying attention in that class since most knowledge I have of space is what I learned from “The Magic School Bus Explorers the Solar System”, I usually went to class and slept. Oh Well, I managed to squeeze out a B somehow.

Intro to Philosophy/Fantasy and World Literature
I’ll put this class into the “Boring Professor/No one pays attention” category. This category is for classes with a professor who doesn’t realize how boring he/she actually is. These professors usually have the false impression that the class is paying attention, but then half way through the semester they realize that most people have stopped coming to class, or just come and talk with their friends. The Philosophy class along with the Literature class have already shown signs that no one is paying attention, plus the fact that smart ass kids wasted half of each class asking stupid questions.

In the literature class the professor is what I’ll call the sterotypical “Book Lady”. Book Lady has old oversize glasses, long gray hair, monotone voice, and uses fancy words that only a literature professor would say. After quoting a passage from some crusty old author she said, “Treadmill of the present” at least five times. (By the way that’s possible the title to a future JDinos album/song, so don’t try to steal it)

Once I think up categories for the other two classes I’ll make a post about them. To anyone in those classes that asked questions, yes I called you smart asses, and yes your questions were stupid. I’ll be the kid sitting on the end of a row with  headphones and an aggravated look on my face for most of the class. Unless I fall asleep.