PT this morning was different, but fun. The POC’s all had to take their PFD, so the IMT’s and PFT’s were on their own. We were on the indoor track in Reynolds where it was hot, muggy, and short. By short I mean the track is much shorter than normal. Usually indoor tracks are one half the size of a normal track, in other words, there are usually eight laps to a mile on an indoor track. NCSU was trying to be different however because they made it 6 and one half laps to a mile. So, when we did our pacing run where you are supposed to complete at least a mile and a half, we had to run at least nine and three quarters laps. Talk about confusing! “So, what lap are you on?” “Well, I just completed lap four and a quarter, how about you?” Do you see what I mean? This is the most odd setup that I have ever seen or heard of for an indoor track. I took a Sociology test today, it really wasn’t that bad. It was on the presentation slides that the teacher downloads off the books web site, so as long as you had read the book or reviewed the downloadable slide show, you were golden. Yesterday I got back my Econ test. I wasn’t terribly thrilled with the grade, but a 21 out of 25 really isn’t that bad. And you can’t say that is an 84% either because our grade comes from the total points you get on all work over the total points you could have gotten. When you look at it that way, only missing four is actually pretty good. For some reason, today is a very muggy day. When I walked back to my room from PT this morning, the fog was so thick it was really hard to see very far. And I found a new pet peeve of mine. If you are walking on a really foggy or muggy day…put out your cigarette. Normally smoke will dissipate fairly rapidly. I do not by any means enjoy walking behind you smokers, so take note. But on a day like today, the smoke just sits there in a big cloud and stinks for all the people who will walk by in the next five minutes. If you really want to kill yourself that way, be my guest, but please don’t try to do the same for me. No matter what you say, you are not cool and smoking does not help that any. A big group of people are going to gather in Witherspoon tonight to watch the presidential debates, so that is probably my plan for this evening. I have to be in bed by eleven though, so no late night tonight. I signed up for Shadow Day last week. If you don’t know what that is, it is when qualified high school students get to hang out with a college kid for two days. They sleep in your room and eat with you and go to all your classes. I thought that would be a fun thing to do, and there are a lot of kids who want to do it this year, so I figured it was the least I could do.
nrfirth | 
30 September 2004 1933 | 
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Had LLab today as my fifth class of the day. It actually wasn’t too bad because we did a drill set, and I was the only one in the group who didn’t do a right face when Boler told us to. Many people would think that me not doing something that the flight commander told the flight to would be bad. This is not so. You see, Alexander had fallen us in and then Boler called a right face. Because Boler had not called, “At my command”, we were not supposed to move. That made Alexander look at my name tag and write my name down. Score one for paying attention!! Alexander is the leader of Honor Guard, so it is good that he thought I did well. I have to go to bed, it is getting late for me. I will put up a extra long post tomorrow to make up for it. Sorry.
E101 presentation today, and boy was that a blast. We did great again because I am able to come up with reasonable answers to the random questions that they are required to ask every group that does a presentation. When they ask, I will make up something that sounds official enough to be able to fool even my teacher. I love having someone in my group come up to me afterwards and say, “Man, you had me convinced that your whole family was Chemical Engineers!” That is the comment I got last week when we did the Chemical Engineering presentation. I owe it all to my parents, they are great at coming up with diplomatic answers that don’t say a whole lot of anything, but sound authoritative and informed. Thanks Dad and Mom. The Minority Career Fair ends today. I didn’t go because I have a job after college already guaranteed as long as I am able to make the four, four and a half, or five years in AFROTC. We went to a seminar last week and they asked the group of about thirty who had a job lined up right after college. I raised my hand (I was the only one with my hand up) and they said, “That is what I thought, there is no one in here that is assured a job after college.” I felt like waving my hand in the air and saying, “Oh, but I do!” The presenter is so used to asking that question and getting no answer that he just assumes no one has their hand raised. Once again I overachieve and get underappreciated.
nrfirth | 28 September 2004 1407 | Comments Off
I just got out of a Chem test. Now I am sitting in the library waiting to have to head off to an Econ test. The chem test was not too bad and the Econ practice test was really easy, so I am hoping for the best for today. I know that impressions about tests are not always correct, but I am going to hold out hope that I did fantastic on Chem and I will do fantastic on Econ. Webassign was changed, and not a single person likes the changes that were made. What used to happen is that say you had ten questions. You could sit down, answer one of them and then submit only that one question to see if you got it right. If you left one blank or you didn’t change an answer, you didn’t use one of the five submissions you had for each blank. You could walk away at any time and not worry about saving work or anything because you had already submitted some of the questions and your cumulative score was already in the system. Now, you have to complete the entire assignment all in one sitting and you have to submit the entire assignment all at once. If you leave one blank, it is wrong, and if you don’t change an answer, you still use one of your five submissions for the assignment. For scoring, you used to be able to see exactly which part of which question you missed. If there were five sections to a question, you could see that you missed part a and c and not have to worry about looking through all your answers to see which one you think is wrong. Now, you can only see the total score you recieved for a question. If you see you got .4 out of .5, you have to go look at every single answer in that question to try to find the one part of it that you missed. You can see that this is not the desirable way to complete homework. I have a feeling we will change back to the old way eventually, but for now we just have to wade through this misery.
nrfirth | 27 September 2004 1411 | Comments Off
