Today while I was going through my workstation in my basement I found something that I had completely forgotten about. Homework from two years ago (Junior year for gradating class 2008). The assignments were for my Honors World Literature class. Honors World Lit, was at my high school the precursor to AP English, and it was considered the same level of difficulty, with the exception of an AP test. Now from my experience none of that was true. About 27 other lucky students and I were placed into Dawn Mulcahy’s 7th hour Honors World Lit. The trouble actually started before school started that year. My high school had what they termed ‘Jumpstart’ days. ‘Jumsptart’ was organized by grade, one day per grade. Jumpstart took place the week before school started, and the idea was you would wake up, and drive to school at about 8am. From there you would meet up with friends, waiting for the building to open. After that you would slowly make your way through the side doors, and a volunteer would ask you you name, you would then recieve a checklist. Then they would take your ID picture, and you school photos, and give you a printed ID card. On from there you would get your schedule, which broke your classes down to what hour, room number, instuctor, and course. Although these had a tendancy to be completely different from the ones you would recieve on the actual first day of school. Next they would have set up, several large tables with 3 ring notebooks, in which you could look up by instructor, and then course what text books you needed. Well under Dawn Mulcahy Honors World Lit, there weren’t any text books listed, nor any supplemental reading books listed. This was rather perplexing for such and advanced course to not have a text book. Well, apparently the trouble didn’t end there, on the first day of school the 28 of us made our ways from our respective 6th hour classes to room 218 (yaaaay! an upstairs room with windows!). We file into the room, and the teacher sitting there says “What are you doing?” To which several of us asked “Are you Mrs. Mulcahy?” She responded “Yes, and?” We responded “Well, according to our schedules we have you for 7th hour Honors World Lit.” To which Mrs. Mulcahy responds “That’s impossible.” But in the end it was possible, apparently an increased number of students in our graduating class were on the AP track for English, which in turn lead to there being several teachers who, wouldn’t normally be teaching this class, to be teaching it. Mrs. Mulcahy was one of those teachers, however the office failed to inform her that she had our class. Thus the reason that we did not have a textbook assignment. Well enough back-story for now, you will hear a lot more about Dawn Mulcahy, as some of the best and some of the most boring times happened there.

A teacher in Mulcahy’s position could do one of two things, she could despite the fact of being irritated that the office did not let her know sooner, dedicate herself to the class, or she could be upset, and try to hide, and treat the class as part prep-hour, part level-4 Honors World Lit class. Add to the fact that out of the 28 students in the class only bout 10 or so really should have been in this level class, and the rest don’t really care to be there in the first place, this breeds a deadly paralysis in the class. This paralysis was started by the students and furthered throughout the year by Mrs. Mulcahy (although she did have her moments of brilliant teaching when she tried). At any rate homework, or work it’s self was nearly non-existent in this class, and I just happened to stumble upon a few original copies of homework from the class. Which has lead me to write this rather long back story, but for those of you who find stories interesting, this post is necessary in explaining the events that lead mine, and several of my close friend’s relationship with Honors World Literature to be a love-hate one.

Well, the other day I found out that I would be testing out of the better part of my freshman year, thanks to APs. That was a great find, however ERAU is holding off until the last possible moment to send any room-mate information. This really hinders the ability to purchase, and plan needed supplies for the room. However I have finally secured a new portable computer for school, I custom-ordered an HP Pavillion 15.4″ with the intel Core 2 Duo T9300, 3gb ram expandable to 4gb, 256mb Nvidia Geforce 8400m, and a 250gb hard disk. However for a television set, that will be an interesting feat. The current model I am looking at bringing is a 19″ Samsung Cathode Ray Tube, (CRT), which is SDTV, and works perfectly fine, however it is so large, and so deep, that it probably takes up too much room. Anyone else who has gone to ERAU know if it is normal to wait until 18 days before orientation to recieve lodging information?

How do I start, today was one of those days where nothing goes as planned. One simply has to turn their head and keep going, and to quote Mama Cass “Make your own kind of music”. First off in the morning my step-mother started ranting to me about something at 7AM, for me coffee should come first. I simply said in response, coffee, black! Although she was speaking to me in English, I was so tired that some of it I actually was hearing in French, which kept perplexing me because she doesn’t speak a word of French, not even “bonjour”. To top it off, we were out of coffee (a bad thing for me, ever since Honors and AP classes, with late homework hours I have been addicted). A simple cup of Earl Grey would have to suffice, and although I love tea, have it mid-day, and at night, it has more of a delayed affect than coffee, you don’t get the same burst of energy, it is kind slowly dispersing throughout the day. 

To make matters worse, my computer is going to be in for repairs longer than I expected, 5-10 days, for s a simple data backup and restore (I have provided them with a sufficient sized back-up external hard disk, and all they are to do is a simple disk image). I asked what caused the problems, and the response was plain and simple, vista corrupted its self. When my father asked what was wrong, the conversation went like this “What happened to it? Vista happened to it.” Well, at least they will be able to back up the system. 

My tip for the day of anyone going to college, is that if you are planning on doing moderate printing, to invest in a laserjet printer. This may sound expensive, however base units now can be found for $60 or so on sale. Mine has been perfect, what happened was about two years ago my HP Deskjet 932C (inkjet) printer died after years of intense usage. I replaced it with an Epson CX7800 (all-in-one) which was an impulse buy, because I had wanted a negative scanner, and the scanner has a negative scan function, and it was a good deal. However not doing me research proved to be a bad thing, Epson is under a class-action lawsuit because the ink-monitor program when it senses ink is low stops the printer from printing, while there is still an estimated 30 pages left of ink. Lets say your printing a black and white word document and the magenta cartridge runs out, it won’t let you print, until you replace it, as there is no grey-scale mode. During AP’s I had this printer, and I was averaging printing out more than 35 pages a night in notes and homework, not only would the 35 pages or so take forever, but I was going through a cartridge a week, and I costed it out at $1 per page to operate. I finally gave in and bought a HP laserjet 1020 ($100) at the time. However it came with a starter cartridge about 1/4-1/2 full, (full cartridges are supposed to get 2500-3000pgs at $59 a piece). However the starter cartridge just died today, after two years and more than 4500pages! A great investment, even if the full cartridge achieves 2500pages comes out to $0.02 per page. It is a strong recommendation, not only is it more efficient however it saves massive amounts of time, and is well worth the extra money from an inkjet (most of which are not built to last more than a year or two).  

 

My little anecdote for today is, related to the coffee. Two years ago, it was out of the honors level classes of 10th grade, and into the AP’s, one of which was A.P. U.S. History, we were supposed to have a legend of a teacher at our school, who unfortunately for us moved on to one of the large stat universities, and left us with a newbie teacher at the helm. Mrs. Woodward, who although ended up doing a great job, is addicted to coffee, and would often have 6-9 cups during a school day. A vehement democratic socialist, her class was not run as a democracy, and our assignments, combined with Alan Brinkely’s “A People’s History of America” was so bland, that it even made some of the most interesting events of our history such as the civil war, world war II, and the cold war an extreme bore, and enough to put a history buff to sleep. However our other 6 supplemental books proved to be fascinating. Our assignments often meant many days with little or no sleep, and tea simply wouldn’t cut it, so in her own way she made us all more or less coffee addicts. And I was given the pleasure of having her all over again last year for World History, which was fun (can you detect the sarcasm).

 

Allow me to introduce myself, my name is Devon, I am a pilot, and will be attending Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University A.K.A. ERAU (Daytona Campus) as a freshman this fall during the 2008-2009 school year. The goal of this blog is to cover my experiences preparing for, and throughout college. It will serve as a record for me as well as hopefully an aid for new students entering college whether it be ERAU or any other university in the states.

More about me, some have termed me a ‘renaissance man’,  I recently graduated from West Bloomfield High School, in Michigan. My main interests are Aviation, computers, classic literature (authors from Rostand, to Gogol, to Sinclair), Big Band music (such as Glenn Miller and Percy Faith), classic music such as Tchaikovsky, I’m fluid in French, love it, and wish to continue my studies in it. I also love Economics, and most sciences, such as physics. I await my urban dictionary word of the day email every day with great anticipation. My favorite television shows are Lost, Pushing Daisies, Drive, Dead Like Me, Star Trek Voyager, Star Trek Enterprise, and Star Trek Next Generation. As you can tell I love mysteries and exploration.  

Okay enough with the trivial background information, my life has never been boring, I will say that much, and I will leave each blog entry with a small back story from my past be it high school or earlier, some will be significant, others will be there for their irony or humor, and others will be there, well because it is a random memory that I came across today or as I am writing the entry.

The reason for starting this blog now is, simple, I am ready to make my first purchase towards college. This being a laptop computer. A little forewarning I am an advanced computer user, who does not like to sit and wait for the computer, I would rather it be faster and have to wait for my input. My main machine, an Intel quad-core processor, with 4gb ram, 640gb hard disk, and 512mb video (oh and VISTA), has decided to corrupt it’s self. It is currently in for a backup, and restore, as every time I add a USB device it cannot recognize the device, ergo I cannot back up my information. This is very aggravating, and although I love Mac, and know how to use it, in the past one thing has kept me running PC’s (Flight Simulator). Vista is worse than ME (millennium edition), and not only that, Microsoft is cramming it down our throats, with ME we at least could have purchased a computer with 98SE, or 2000Pro/NT, and if not we could downgrade or upgrade. However that is not an option with Vista, the drivers simply will not run in XP. The machine I am using to write this is my old reliable Sony Viao (Celeron 600mhz, 385mb ram, 15gb hd, and XP Pro). It may be slow, but it keeps going, and with a fresh install of XP it runs smoother than my Vista machine. At any-rate, back to the laptop, I would opt for a Mac. However ERAU is strictly a PC school, they have the 7th most powerful computer in the world there (provided by Dell), and they have a contract with Dell that they get new computers, ever year or so. This is also another problem for me as I am about the furthest thing from a Dell fan, I used to love Acer, but now Sony or HP (If I don’t have the time to build the machine myself). Every-time I talk to someone at ERAU I get a different answer regardless what it is regarding. You would think that the worlds only Aviation dedicated school with a tuition of $40k a year would at least have some consistency. Anyone out there that does not have to have a PC I would recommend a Mac, a little more expensive, but they will last longer, battery life is about 6-8hrs (on my old Ibook g3 12″ that I rebuilt), they almost never crash, and have only 1 known virus. The operating system is logical and easy to use, if you have learned how to use Windows reasonably well, you can learn Mac no problem. For me however I would opt for the most powerful PC laptop within my budget, which is a 17″ custom configured HP with 2.4ghz core 2 duo, 4gb ram, 400gb hd, and a 512mb dedicated video card with turbo cache of 1.5gb and a vista rating of 4.5. However weighing over 8lbs I would not like to carry it to class. A 15″ or smaller is going to have to suffice, granted this is a secondary machine, as I am bringing my desktop, I would love a dedicated graphics card for increased performance, and have thought about the Dell XPS M1330 (a 13.3″ power-oriented computer, however most configurations use an integrated card). I will more likely opt for an HP with a dedicated graphics card. At any rate I am not looking forward to loading my over 200gb worth of data, files, and software back on to my desktop when I get it back, but it will have to be done. As for the other computer I will update the blog when I make a decision, and purchase it. 

Sorry to switch subjects so drastically, however I am wrapping up this entry, and I am going to explain my end story category (what I mentioned earlier). As I said before my life has never been boring. In school I have had some of the world’s worst and craziest school-bus drivers, some of the craziest teachers, as well as a few of the best, and some quite insane family ordeals.  

For today’s story I choose to introduce you to Mrs. Evola. Mrs. Evola was my AP Macro Economics and Micro Economics teacher this year. She has a great passion for economics however has a hard time articulating, in the margins of my notes I would write down verbatim her crazily worded sayings which I have saved in a compiled file on my computer that is in for maintenance. However today’s article in the Economist, about the Fed cutting interest rates by three quarters of a point, reminded me of her, and what she would say Ben Bernanke being In like Flynn (referring to Errol Flynn), to save the economy. Which also brings back lectures about how getting rid of OPEC would do away with all of our problems (I agree it would help with many), also that the sub-prime mortgages should have been prevented by Bernanke. However on the funnier side, it reminds me of her favorite saying that the world’s economy hinges on the Ford Fiesta, and Tropicana Orange Juice. 

Please send some feedback. And I hope you have enjoyed reading this.