Trapped at Berkeley

via: carnivalesque.net

(18:57:12) xcarnivalesQue: i am not the stalin of fish!

It happens to me every semester. My sleep patterns get totally out of control. For the past two weeks, I’ve slept at nearly 5 or 6 AM and woken up at 7 AM, when I decide to go to classes, and 1 PM, when I decide to not go to classes. You can guess which option I choose most of the time.

The strange thing is that my weird sleep patterns and habitual failure to go to class don’t dramatically affect my grades - I still do pretty well. I get bored in the lectures that I do attend, and I prefer learning out of books. I go to discussions, most office hours, and laboratories, though. I think those three have been the most worthwhile academic components of my college experience.

I wonder if there are any other students that feel the same way.

xcarnivalesQue: okay, here’s the rundown:
xcarnivalesQue: <— good girl
xcarnivalesQue: <— lazy
xcarnivalesQue: <— short, asian girl who likes food
xcarnivalesQue: <— hates washing dishes
xcarnivalesQue: and. um. yeah.
xcarnivalesQue: <— likes stuffed animals and huggable things
xcarnivalesQue: & three legged starfish. and dinosaurs. and stuffed rocks. and penguins.

How often do you see a three-legged starfish with a scarf? It’s from Katherine’s blog.

According to the Cal Dining website, the dorm dining commons will begin offering pizzas on week nights after the regular meal hours. Students will be able to “call-in” their orders, pick them up in person, and pay with their dining points or plain cash.

While I’m not a fan of Cal Dining’s pizza, this will certainly help me to save some cash; I have too many dining points as it is, and pizza is the perfect energy food for engineers. Last year I practically spent all my allowance money on food - a typical order from West Coast Pizza, one of the better pizzerias in town, usually costs $20 with tax, delivery, and tip. And I was ordering multiple pizzas per a week. I did eat meals at the dining commons, but they close rather early (7:30 PM for Foothill), and after that you either have to wander the streets of Berkeley to find food or order pizza.

Now I just have to figure out how I should spend my now-liberated allowance…

An uncertainty principle relating to Chemistry 120A says that a student’s grades become more uncertain when fewer classes are attended.
Chemistry 120A Syllabus

Although a spoof of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, my professor’s statement is actually quite truthful in regards to most UC Berkeley classes.

In case you’d like to know the official websites for my classes, I’ve listed them below. If you plan on taking any of them, downloading a copy of the websites using a spidering tool might be advisable - i.e., the posted solutions could come in handy. Hint: you might need to disable robots.txt parsing and enable the –near parameter to get the spidering tool to download solutions.

Chemical Engineering 150A - Transport Processes - Professor Radke [Password Required]
Chemistry 120A - Physical Chemistry - Professor Leone
Chemistry 104A - Inorganic Chemistry - Professor Shapiro [Blackboard]
Engineering 45 - Properties of Materials - Professor Morris
Physics 7C - Optics, Special Relativity, Quantum - Professor Wohl

I have to echo Matthew Haughey’s comments regarding admins taking down their servers for maintenance on a daily or weekly basis: is it really necessary? UC Berkeley takes down their online schedule and other services for a few hours everyday for maintenance:

I think taking down servers for maintenance is a great idea, and that more admins need to be willing to do that, but do you really have to do it on a daily basis? Most patches don’t even require a reboot, and new software packages don’t come out THAT often (and if you’re upgrading packages on a daily basis via CVS, you have bigger things to worry about).

Some wonderful tools are based upon Berkeley’s online schedule, and they are rendered useless when the server goes down for maintenance. While I thank the admins for at least remembering to perform the maintenance during the off-hours, some students - like me - need to check some schedule-related things early on the morning before class starts.

Yeah, yeah, this is a stupid rant. There are better things I should be doing, like donating cash to the Red Cross to help tsunami victims.

I’ve posted my Spring 2005 class schedule here. Mind you, the schedule does not reflect the all-too-important-must-go-to office hours.

UC Berkeley classes start Tuesday, January 18, 2005.