Zhanga: January 2007

Entries have their own pages now. Click the date to see the entry by itself with its comments.

Wednesday, January 31, 2007 (3 comments)

I've lost my morals and put ads on this site. There are a few "Sponsored Links" on a few pages, like this one and this one and the old Zhanga pages. Basically, the couple of pages that get the most hits from search engines. I'm a little curious about how much money Google AdSense gives.

Don't worry, though. Most of you won't ever notice the ads because (1) you are like me and use AdBlock Plus or something similar so you never see ads online, and (2) the ads are targeted against random visitors, not you. So there won't be ads on the current Zhanga page, or the home page, or pages like Dutterisms which are generally uninteresting to random visitors.

On a different note, I want to point out that 3% of my day is a lot of time. Consider this breakdown of my day (this doesn't include night hours):

When you consider that only 11% of my day (brushing teeth, showering, toilet, awake in class) is spent productively, and that time on the toilet makes up over a quarter of this productive time, then yes, in fact 3% is a significant amount of time.

1:30PM

Tuesday, January 30, 2007 (3 comments)

I'm in econometrics right now. In two weeks, we've gone through almost all of AP Stat, except in much more gory detail. I hate proofs.

Does anybody else find the CLT funny? Do you laugh inside when you see presentation slides entitled "Using the CLT" or "Applications of the CLT"? (Central limit theorem.) God I'm such a nerd. I typoed CLT into CLI (command line interface) three times, including in this sentence complaining about the typos.

I think one of the greatest signs that you've done too many statistics problems in the past is if the number 1.645 looks significant (no pun intended) to you but you can't quite put a finger on what exactly that number does.

Um, do either of my two readers know any stat? I think I just wrote a post to myself.

While I'm here, I would like to clear up a misconception about the last post: I was not constipated. If I were constipated it wouldn't have smelled because nothing would have come out. Dummy. And why do I report my toilet activities so much? Well, I write about significant events in my life. Since I spend about 3% of my awake time on the toilet, it is a very significant part of my life. Therefore I feel that you, as an avid follower of my life, should know about my toilet activities.

9:09AM

Friday, January 26, 2007 (4 comments)

Today was the career fair. ~80ish companies showed up, with 2-4 recruiters/representatives per company. I went to maybe 10-15 tables and talked with various people, gave out some resumés, etc. Several things worth mentioning:

  1. Banks/financial institutions are whores:
    Me: Hi! I'm David, an econ/CS double major.
    Bank: Hi, I'm blahblah, nice to meet you!
    ...
    Bank: So what year are you?
    Me: I'm currently a sophomore.
    Bank: Oh, well, we're looking primarily for juniors, but we have hired sophomores in the past...
  2. Tech firms probably think the same way but just don't say it.
  3. Lots of free stuff. Nortel had a pile of a gazillion USB drives... then I went back and found out it's 32 MB. Oh well. Not complaining. Oh yeah, Bank of America had umbrellas (??) which I really need, but the one I got was broken!
  4. Only one of the recruiters I spoke to was actually interested enough to ask me to schedule an interview right away. Luck? Probably not. She was the only recruiter I spoke with whose English reminded me of my mother.
  5. The Redhat woman's eyes lit up when I mentioned that I use Fedora (a Redhat product; a free Linux operating system). I will probably pee my pants for a week straight if I get an internship or something at Redhat. Note that "something" is defined very loosely here, e.g. anything higher than toilet-cleaning staff.

Speaking of toilet-cleaning staff... (you guessed it!) this brings me to my next topic. Yesterday I forgot to empty myself because a stupid class got in the way and I had to hold it in. So today was... yeah. Pretty bad.

Anyways, about a minute after I sat down and began the very gratifying process, and old janitor guy and his younger female colleague walked in. As soon as the guy came in, he went "wooooohh!!" Then he and the lady walked around, looked at a shower thing or something for about a minute, and walked out.

On the way out, the lady said "Come on, let's go, I've had enough of that" in a very black way.

I am so proud of myself.

(Sorry, Maylene. If you cook me better food than what I'm eating now, then it won't smell so bad.)

6:53PM

Monday, January 22, 2007 (2 comments)

Sorry, I have to rant. I won't hold it against you if you don't read it.

What is it with people hating on nerds? Yeah, hide your bumbling incompetence by blaming it on the poor IT people who keep your computers connected to the Internet, allowing you to further propagate your idiocy to people all over the world.

Here's the beginning of an email I got today (after a similar one 10 minutes earlier:

Sorry about the link not working in the last email -- copy and paste the link below into your web address. Since OIT likes to make things as difficult as possible, copy the first line and then the second line into the browser window and it should work.

survey.oit.duke.edu/[...huge long URL...]

So there's several things wrong with this:

  1. The first time the link was sent, it was sent in both HTML and text formats (like a lot of emails). The HTML version had a link that you could click on... they managed to screw up the plain text one.
  2. The second time the link was sent (in the quoted text above), the text wasn't clickable but it was blue, bold, and underlined. I tried clicking it multiple times before figuring this out. This caused me to feel retarded.
  3. The text of this email tells me to copy the first line, then the second line. There is no second line.
  4. The link from the first email and the correction sent in the second email go to the same place.
  5. They moron who wrote this email blames OIT (Office of Information Technology or something) for the mishap, and for liking to "make things as difficult as possible." Did I hear you complaining last night when you were downloading movies at 8500 KB/s on BitTorrent? With no ports filtered by OIT? Didn't think so.

I can only draw one conclusion from this: the author of this email is a total idiot who doesn't even know how to write an email. Even my 81-year-old grandfather can do that! And on top of that, this stupid guy likes to blame IT crew for his idiocy.

My favorite part about this whole thing is that the non-link in the second email is blue, bold, and underlined. As if changing its formatting is going to magically make it a clickable link. What a noob.

8:57PM

Sunday, January 21, 2007 (1 comment)

I guess I don't really have to worry about falling asleep in econ any more:

[...some complaining about people reading the paper during class...]

Falling asleep is an acceptable, involuntary, response to my lectures being boring. Not coming to class is another acceptable, voluntary, response. Reading the paper is neither. Please don't make me call you on it.

Thanks,
Craig

What an awesome professor. I only wish his tone of speaking wasn't so monotonous and sleep-inducing.

Random, but don't you hate chapped lips? Especially when they split apart? That's really annoying. Whoever intelligently designed human lips is an asshole.

2:48PM

Saturday, January 20, 2007 (0 comments)

I have econ in the afternoon, directly after two classes and lunch. Clearly, trying to stay awake in this class is, by any measure, an exercise in futility. The first day, I managed to stay awake for probably ten minutes.

Anyways, when I woke up, a funny dialogue between the guys next to my left ensued. In order to prevent embarassment, let's call the guy next to me Ed (no negative connotation intended), and the next guy over Jack:

Ed: Was it loud?
Jack: It was pretty damn loud.

What happened? Ed fell asleep but farted himself awake just before I woke up. Nice.

9:44PM

Tuesday, January 16, 2007 (1 comment)

I've been to Chinese class all three times so far, and all three times this girl has caused me to jump a little. She looks exactly like Roger's mom, and the uncanny resemblance is creepy/freaky. So far, every time I've seen her the first thought that comes to my mind is "Roger's mom." She wears similar glasses, too.

Unfortunately, I won't be able to Facebook-stalk a picture of her, because it's impossible to learn people's American names in that class as everything is done in Chinese.

Ok, that's not the real story. Did you know that spam nowadays uses poetry? Check this out:

Hows it hanging?
Long,loose and full of juice..
Or shrivled, small.. not big at all.
If the second describes you, ManXL can help.

10:44PM

Wednesday, January 10, 2007 (3 comments)

I found this gem in the lacrosse "Case in Brief" as presented by today's Chronicle:

Dec. 22 -- Nifong drops rape charges after alleged victim says she is no longer certain she was penetrated by a penis.

I was in line to get lunch when I read this, and I cracked up. Is this woman serious? She was at one point certain that a penis went into some orifice of hers, but now she is starting to have doubts?

I don't know about you, but regardless of whether I get raped, I don't think that at any point in my life I will wonder, "Hmm, did that go inside of me forcefully and without my consent? I don't remember..."

11:56AM

Monday, January 8, 2007 (2 comments)

It's about time. This is an excerpt of an email sent by Richard Brodhead, the president of Duke:

After Christmas, the North Carolina State Bar announced that it had reviewed concerns about the district attorney's public statements and found grounds to file a formal complaint. Days later, the North Carolina Conference of District Attorneys also called on Mr. Nifong to recuse himself in this case.

(If you're forgotten, Nifong is the asshat district attorney here trying to convict the Duke lacrosse team of all sorts of stuff.)

5:38PM

Saturday, January 6, 2007 (3 comments)

I'm back at Duke now. I have a couple of things to tell you about my last few days at home.

Last night, I was coming home from Maylene's house at 7-ish when Tiffany called me and told me that she and Stephen were stuck on the shoulder of I-85 because she hit the median of some road and her two left tires went flat. By the time I got there, neither of the flat tires had any air left at all. They must have seriously exploded.

Tires probably weren't the only things exploding that night. I tried to look inside her car but all the windows were too fogged up for me to even see the steering wheel.

Then I got home and ate and whatever, and my mom gave me a basket with the laundry that she did for me. I have a reached a new era of sadness. You know you need to grow when you're a 19-year-old boy and your mom thinks that your 9-year-old sister's t-shirt is yours.

Dragon Gate is amazing today. Today's the first day they've ever given me chopsticks (granted, I had to ask for them, but still), and they delivered in less than ten minutes. Deadly.

8:08PM

Thursday, January 4, 2007 (2 comments)

My dad came home yesterday afternoon, and as soon as he did that, I got into the car and drove away. And the CD player was on pretty loudly... playing the end of Born To Make You Happy. Yes! I win again!

I have a question. In the song Miracle, she sings "you cheated on me from behind." Does anybody know what that means? I can't stay out of the gutter on that one.

3:41PM

Monday, January 1, 2007 (2 comments)

Happy New Year, everyone.

9:03AM

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