Woohoo! Housing that doesn't suck... finally

As much as I will miss Fort Awesome next year when I'm not sharing a hallway and bathroom with a bunch of chain-smoking, binge-drinking morons, I think I will be happy in my new home on the 20th floor of East Campus. Woohoo! :-D
The lottery tried to screw my friends and me over for a third consecutive year (we got a number almost as crappy as the one that landed four of us in Wein this year) we happened, by glorious coincidence, to be one of 11 groups of 5 people competing for 17 suites with 5 singles. We were the 8th group of our size to pick but our first choice suite hadn't been taken yet. Something at this damned school worked out in my favor. Happiness.

Fire safety, CU style

In every year of my undergrad career so far, false fire alarms have been a problem in at least one dorm on campus. This year, however, there have been several actual fires. In response, Residential Programs and Public Safety are sponsoring several events involving prizes and free food. If I'd known we would be rewarded with free food and/or iTunes gift certificates, I could have arranged for actual fires my freshman and sophomore years. Damnit... how disappointing.

Elephant parade!! Or a mid-week off-campus (mis-)adventure

This week, the Ringling Bros. circus is supposed to start at Madison Square Garden. Every year, around this time they march the elephants in from Queens and across 34th street to MSG. According to the NYC website this was supposed to be March 21 at 11:30pm. I assumed this would be accurate, which isn't unreasonable because the city should to know when the street is going to be closed. So a bunch of friends and I went downtown to see the elephants. But there were no elephants. The cops at Penn Station said that they had been brought in around 3:00am that morning. Adding insult to our disappointment, they also thought we were tourists... wtf?

What I'm unhappy about now

I want to go back to the city this afternoon. First, I need to go to the mall to acquire at least two new pairs of jeans. I also want to go to the video store to get the Wallace and Gromit DVD and possibly HP4. This should not pose a problem because there are two cars here and no one other than me is home to drive either of them. Unfortunately, it appears that all keys for the Civic are being held by the absent members of the household. Meanwhile I have learned that the Accord, for which I do have a key, has a dead battery. It's also facing uphill and stuck in Park. And, for the same reason that I couldn't take the Civic in the first place, I can't use the Civic to jump it - that's right - I don't have the keys.
Note to my family: Thanks a bunch. It's not like I really wanted to get my shopping done before going back to school. I hope all those extra keys you're carrying around are very useful.

Update: Ok, so it turned out that my relatives had not, in fact, taken all of the keys for the working car. However, the extra key was still not quite where it was supposed to be. My mom found it for me when she got home.

Yet more randomness

Usually about once a week some campus publication or another will be left outside my door. Usually, about once a month the maintenence people remove said publications from outside my door because I'm too lazy to pick them up and dispose of them myself. Recently however, I was informed that there was an article about one of my friends in one of them so I actually picked up a copy and read it. It turns out that The Blue and White is surprisingly entertaining. From the back cover:

Word has it that it costs the university 15 cents in used energy every time you press the handicapped button to open the doors into John Jay or Butler.

Tuition for a full year is about $40,000, which equals 266,666 door openings.

The B&W has calculated that it takes the door five seconds to open and close. Therefore, it would take you 370.37 hours to use up all of that money, or about 46 days of pressing the button constantly from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Personally, I suspect that the handicapped doors are more expensive than that.. Mostly because their overuse causes them to break fairly often. [And they definitely are overused - I'm certainly not paying $40,000/yr to open doors for myself.] Anyway, the B&W also has a blog where I found a post that I wish I'd thought to do myself: Bwog Quiz: Know your Facades!

Randomness - because I have time :-D

Well, technically I still have to write a lab report. And I should do that before I forget the details of the lab... but I also had a Qauntum midterm and German test today and I'm too happy to be done with those to do anything else productive today. I found some pictures on my camera's flash card - so I'm posting those.

The first one was from several weeks ago. I think it was the same day that I was working at the theatre from 9am - 6:30pm. Anyway, I woke up at 7:30, after about four hours of sleep and this was what I found on my door. While this was not quite as scary as the time last year when my room phone awakened me at 5:30 or 6am and I realized that my roommate (who had gone out) hadn't come back... and that the phone was ringing at an ungodly early hour... it did freak me out for the 45 seconds it took to wake up enough to read it and realize it was a joke/protest of Columbia's expansion plan.

The other two are pictures of sunset from my room. I can see the sky. W00t! After living in a cave last year, I don't think I will ever get over the novelty of being able to see the sky from my room (without sticking my head out the window). :-D

In which the chronically sleep-deprived protagonist shows signs of intellectual impairment

So here's something to make everyone glad that my day-to-day life at school doesn't involve the operation of heavy machinery, cars, etc. I went to bed at about 4:15 this morning after roughly eight hours of doing quantum homework with a couple friends. I was tired to begin with, so this was not a good thing. I started having problems with scientific notation around 10pm. Below are excerpts from conversations with one of said friends (as well as I can remember them) -

Me: I'm getting 9.99e499... I think this is my calculator maxing out rather than the answer we want.
Laura: Hmm...
Me: 1^500 shouldn't be what we get
Laura: [pause to let me think] ... It isn't what you get.
Me: Oh right.. ha ha... 10^500 would be 1^501
Laura: [pause to let me think] Um, no.
Me: 1 to the... oh right.

And that wasn't the end of it. A few hours later:

Me: I get something or other times ten to the 33.
Laura: That's interesting, it's bigger than ten to the 32 which is what I got from doing this the first way - so that's good. I'm not sure I believe the difference isn't larger than that though...
Me: 10^32 to 10^33 is a fairly large [*] difference...
Laura: [pause while I smile guiltily] ... you mean, like, a factor of ten...
Me: Okay, I think I'm just going to stop talking now.

So later still, when Laura goes, "Hey, I've got a stupid question." I laugh and reply "Yeah, in the overall scheme of things it probably isn't."

Right, so anyway, that was all pretty funny (if also pretty embarrassing). The not so funny part is that there's a midterm on Thursday and I'm clearly at least 4 hours of sleep beyond coherence. Today, I didn't have to do any math (fortunately) but I do feel sort of like I've forgotten the last two weeks of German and several years of English. Tonight, I plan to be in bed by 9.

[*] - To my credit (not worth much now, I know), I realized I was saying something else stupid here. It was just too late to stop.