Journal 22

Today I am going to try something different, I am actually going to use this journal for a real purpose, not that my random ramblings aren't a purpose. Today I am going to talk about the new assignment we went over in class. I picked Chernobyl for the topic of my research paper. I am actually very excited to learn more about this topic. I have always been interested in how something as catastrophic to not only the Ukraine but the whole world happened and how people are making sure that it never happens again. So to start this out I am going to lay out what I hope to learn and write about in the paper. There are so many ways to look at a disaster like this and I hope to cover as many as them as I can so my paper could be possibly useful to others than myself. First I will focus on how the accident happened, this is an obvious one, but it seems like a good way to lead into the paper. I will also hit on how it affected the surrounding people and environment. And finally and this is a biggie to me, I want to focus on how it is being prevented today since from the little researching I did today there are still reactors identical to the ones used in chernobyl being used today.

Journal 21

I am going to be honest, sometimes I fall behind on my journal entries, with this one it is painfully obvious that I didn't write it on Monday. But anyway on with the Obama rally. Spartan TV had set up their base camp I guess you would call it at the Music building, within ear shot of the rally, which was helpful later. The plan was to report on the happenings in the line which basically stretched across campus and then later stream the rally live to anyone watching. So for the first few hours we would have a camera pointed at the line and then do little live hits talking about what was happening. We would also the the camera around and find interesting stories like a school teacher that brought his whole class to the rally. We also interviewed the small group of McCain supporters who actually had a press secretary, intense right? Then finally came the rally. We had cameras set up right in front with the rest of the press so we got an awesome shot. At the peak we had about 180 people watching the station, which for the launch was a really good number.

Journal 20

Project's due tomorrow and for once I have basically finished everything and not waited until the last minute. There are still a few things I would like to do to finish up my reflection based on some of the suggestions I got today in class. Right now the articles are basically just words in a word document, but I hope to get some graphics or pictures into it. I have a lot of experience in laying out pages and making graphics from being the graphics editor on my school newspaper last year. I don't know if I will have time to do all that though. I just got out of my drawing class and I unfortunately have to study for another math quiz tomorrow so I won't have time to do any of that tonight. On top of that, I am going home tomorrow and my ride will be here at 10am, right when I get out of my journalism class. And it is going to take me to port huron first to meet up with my real ride who is at his boat, so I might be cutting it close to the 5pm deadline and might not be able to get everything done, I guess only time will tell though.

Journal 19

I finished the edits on my articles before class today and the reflection is going well, just to give you a little update. But this is not going to be the focus of my journal entry. I just got back from a practice taping for Focal Point. Focal Point is the broadcast news program for Michigan State. Because of my background in putting a variety of graphics together for my high school, I was put in charge of running the graphics for the show. I showed up at the studio at 5pm, 1 hour earlier than the anchors, etc. with some of the other crew to set up the set, cameras, etc. Then after a little while we started trying to get through the show. There weren't many graphics because they had just switched to a new news system and we were basing the show off the last show from last year, so there wasn't much to do, hopefully it will be more interesting on the real show. I will also hopefully putting together some graphics for the show which is what I really want to do.

Journal 18

The article project is due friday, uh-oh. It's not that I having problems with anything right now, my reflection is going pretty well, what I have done of it at least. Based on the suggestions I got last thursday in class I decided to do a little reorganizing and re-prioritizing on both of my articles. For starters, both my articles basically started out the same way by talking about the process of designing open source applications, but as I was reading it on thursday we noticed that college students probably don't really care how it was designed, businesses would because they might be basing the operations of their company on these apps. So instead I decided to focus on the apps themselves in the college student article. Also with the business article I will give some application recommendations at the end to get a little more specific. I haven't done it yet, because to be honest I was lazy all weekend (gotta stop doing that). But don't worry it will get done.

Journal 17

Well it's Monday, and we all know what that means, back to the grind... Not that I don't enjoy going to all my classes, I like them, well most of them. I just got done with my morning classes and I have some bad news, on friday I have my first Statistics test. Up until now we have had 2 quizzes, the first one I aced with flying colors, while the second one, well let's just say I didn't do so hot on. It's okay though because the quizzes are only worth a small portion of our grade and there are a lot more of them. Anyway, I really need to crack down and study for this because there are only 4 tests in the class so I guess you could say they are somewhat influential to my grade... I don't want to be one of those people that did really good all throughout high school, and then just dropped off the deep end when they went to college. Although this is not as bad as some other people and I am probably just overreacting.

Journal 16

Man what a stressful day today was. The reason is that today was finally the day that all my procrastination caught up with me. I have been putting off assignments in my math class, my drawing class, but not yours of course... That was sarcasm, it doesn't come off well on the interwebs. I had actually put off finishing off my two articles until thursday morning. On top of that I put off my sketchbook drawings for my drawing class. One of the assignments was a "2-Hour" drawing that actually only lasted about 45 minutes, shh don't tell my art teacher, lol. And then on top of all of that I had to study for my statistics quiz that I have tomorrow. I gotta say I don't think I have ever put off this much work, I seriously didn't have any time to do anything fun today. It's finally over though, and I am going to make sure that this never happens again because  I can't deal with this much stress.

Journal 15

If you didn't know, I can be a bit of a procrastinator and all this week I have been putting some stuff off that I probably shouldn't have. And well as you can assume this was not the best decision I have made. The thing is, I got so used to not working as hard in school as I usually did my senior year of high school, I know typical Senioritus right? Well now that I have been at college I am finding it hard to get back into the swing of things especially with all the easy distractions I am surrounded by every day.

I guess though that I'll just have to buckle down and get stuff done and work harder so this won't happen again, which I think it unfortunately will, but hopefully not as bad. Anyway I need to get to work now.

Journal 14

Well I just don't have any idea what to write about today... I guess I'll just start talking about what I usually do when I don't have anything to talk about. Technology. As you can assume, I am a bit of a mac fanboy, I have been using macs for about 3 years now and have never thought of switching back well to windows at least. There have been a few times where I thought of switching to Linux. Truth be told though, Linux is fun and all, but it seems like too much work to be used as an everyday computer. Though this may sound like a cheesy line from an apple commercial, but with a Mac everything "just works." On the other hand with windows most of the time, everything "just works, maybe, eventually, with some work." Okay that might be a little harsh, but that's the way I have found things to work most of the time when I am using Windows, which is only when I have to.

Journal 13

I hate mondays, says Garfield while still laying in his cat bed after giving his alarm clock a good smashing. Why does Garfield hate mondays? I don't know, why is he even getting up? He doesn't have a job or any type of school to go to. It doesn't make sense. If anything, I should hate mondays, which I do, why? because I have the pleasure of having two, count them, two morning classes on Mondays, first Math and then Journalism, I happen to really enjoy the Journalism class so that is not that bad, but waking up for the Math class is a really big pain, in fact when I get off classes I usually end up taking a nap to make up some sleep before your class. Well I guess there is nothing I can do about it now, but it still sucks...

Journal 12

So it's September 11th and for the first year since the attacks happened, people aren't really making as big of deal out of it as they usually do each year. Which I guess is good and bad at the same time. It's good that people aren't making as big of deal anymore because it was almost like the anniversary was being exploited. But it's also bad to think that Americans have forgotten about something so devastating to so many people so quickly. On another note about september 11th, what is going on with the rebuilding of the towers? There has been a plan in place for years now, but it seems like it has been taking them forever to get anything done on it. I mean this is suppose to be a symbol of how strong America is and how we can bounce back after a terrible tragedy like that, but it doesn't seem as effective the longer and longer it takes.

Journal 11

Well it's Wednesday and I am sitting here watching one of my favorite shows, Mythbusters. I don't know if you have seen the show before, I am sure you have at least heard of or about it, I mean who hasn't. Anyway this show is just downright awesome and one of the greatest show ideas in a while. Think about how myths were though of before this show was around, if you were confronted with a myth you were pretty certain wasn't true and the people or peoples you are talking to disagreed with you, you really had no argument to back you up, but now with the advent of this show you can end a argument on most myths with one simple phrase, Mythbusters. And people will believe you most of the time because they either watch or have heard about the show. To be honest sometimes when I think a myth is untrue I will just say that Mythbusters disproved it, even if they really didn't, and people will believe me.

Journal 10

I've been in college for about 3 weeks now, and I have noticed that a lot of the excitement has started to wear down. With all of those thoughts slowly getting out of my head I am starting to think about all my friends and family I have at home and how I am really starting to miss them. I think I am going to go home this weekend and see some of them. It's been 3 weeks, I've been here long enough to justify going home for a weekend, lol. And also I am joining a Intramural Roller Hockey Team so I need to head home and pick up some equipment to play anyway. If you haven't noticed I am trying to justify going home to myself, and I think I am doing pretty well. I do have a lot of homework that should probably get finished over the weekend, so I am going to have to try to fit that in with hanging out with friends.

Journal 9

In my last journal entry I talked briefly about the new iPods that came out, quickly referring to the new Genius feature in iTunes. At that point in time I had not yet upgraded to iTunes 8 so I didn't have a chance to actually use the feature and didn't know much about it aside from what I saw in the apple keynote. Now I have been using Genius for a few days now, and I have to say that it is the best feature added into iTunes since I don't know the iTunes store itself. I have downloaded so many songs that I probably would have never even thought of downloading because of genius suggesting songs to me in it's sidebar as I listen to music. Now this can also have a bit of a drawback for me. See over the past few days I have downloaded way to many songs, lol, because they are just right there and so easy to download. So I guess I will have to start showing some discretion before I download with genius so I don't go broke.

Journal 8

So new iPods came out today, and woah. If you have yet to notice yet, I am quite a bit of a Mac fanboy so I get pretty excited when things like this happen. I watched the whole keynote that Steve Jobs gave at his special event. Ok now on to the ipods. The biggest change in the lineup comes in the iPod nano. This is now it's 4th generation. The biggest change is how it has gone back to it's tall and skinny design with a long display that still provides a decent video watching mode. Other than that and the addition of Genius, which is a new iTunes feature that not only suggests songs to you based on your music library, but also can compile playlists that will fit together seamlessly with one click. The new iPod touch also supports this new feature in addition to dropping in price and getting a new redesign with a few ascetic changes like it being thinner, gaining volume controls on the side like the iPhone and also gaining an internal speaker for "casual listening."

Journal 7

So I have this drawing class every Tuesday and Thursday from 6pm to 9pm. When I signed up for the class I thought it wouldn't be bad, but now after being through a few classes I would have to say that it stinks. Not so much the time of the class, I mean 6pm to 9pm is kinda sucky, but the biggest problem is how long the class is. It's almost 3 hours and every class feels like an eternity. We do get breaks every hour for 10 minutes or so because we can't be sitting down while we are drawing, but even with those the class is just too much. I would rather have the class every day of the week for 1 hour or so than having it the two days for so long. Hopefully it'll get better as time goes on.

Journal 6

In my last journal I made a brief reference to a job I had over the summer. You might not have thought twice about it when you were reading over it, but I think you will think about it twice now when I tell you what it was. Over the summer, I worked at a cemetery. Yeah that's right, a cemetery, jewish cemetery to be exact. Now I know the first thing you went to when I said that, you immediately thought "wow you're a grave-digger?" No I wasn't that's not the only job that a person can have at a cemetery if you didn't know. Though over the course of the summer I did help dig about 4 graves, my actual job title was just general maintenance, which meant most of the time I was cutting grass with a push mower. It was a lot of work, but I gotta say the people there were great and I am missing working there.

Journal 5

I am on my way back from up north and man was it a great weekend. For starters, I finally was able to ride my brother's 4-wheeler. I hadn't been riding it up to now for two reasons. One, and this is kinda a big one, my brother didn't want me riding it, lol. And two, it has a manual transmission which I had no idea how to use until I finally learned how to drive a stick at my job this summer. Another great thing was that my cousin Kevin decided to come up for the weekend too, which is always a fun experience. Besides all of that, my family and I finally were able to do something we have been wanting to do since we got the place. We were finally able to go tubing down the river that runs on the back of our property. It didn't work out as well as we planned though, one the bugs were just atrocious and two the river was really shallow and cold this year so there were a number of occasions where we bottomed out and had to walk down the river until it got deeper again.