Hi everyone! My sister is a senior in high school, and she’s working on college admissions (unlike me, she actually has the grades to go to a real university). So, to everyone who’s been to college, or is currently there, she was wondering if any of y’all had any helpful/useful advice for her.

Just reply to this thread, I’ll send her a link to it (not sure if she has an LJ account, which is why this is a public entry). Thanks so much!

My mom’s birthday is tomorrow (technically today, as I type this). I don’t normally do a lot for her birthday, I save the really “wow” gift ideas for Christmas. However, I couldn’t afford to do anything for her for mother’s day (I usually take her out for dinner at one of her favourite restaurants, and I didn’t even have the money for that), and I had a little extra cash this month, so I wanted to try to make it up to her.

Two nights ago, I had a brilliant idea. She always talks about how she’d like a particular picture of mine from Myrtle Beach (she loves the beach) framed so she can hang it in her office. And earlier this week, she showed me a small print of a picture my sister took of the beach, a very stunning sunrise shot over the ocean. Plus, we’re not going to be able to take family vacations forever, with my sister going to college next year and me planning to leave the state when I’m able. So, I decided to put the two aforementioned pictures together, along with a new one I took there that she likes, into a large frame with some nice matting and a little dedication. It’d be well-suited to hang on the huge blank wall in her living room that we can’t figure out how to decorate, and I know she’d love it.

So, after doing a bit of processing to get the pictures ready for significant enlargement, I started running the errands necessary to put this together. I went to my favourite photo lab to have the pictures blown up, which went smoother than I thought, then to the frame store while the prints were being printed. Since the enlargments alone were like $75 for all three, my grandma gave some much needed assistance in purchasing the frame and matting. All’s well so far.

After mom went to bed, my sister and I took over mom’s dining room table to assemble this project. She provided much-needed assistance, and aside from my usual measuring screwups (I have somewhat shaky hands, especially when concentrating on detail work, so measuring and marking things accurately is a big challenge for me), everything seemed to be going smoothly. At about 2am, we had been working on this for over an hour (just for measuring), and I didn’t really need her help for cutting, so she went on to bed. I took a half-hour break to rest my back, and proceeded to start cutting.

Now, I already knew that without fancy tools, I wouldn’t be able to cut the mat with that snazzy bevelled edge that’s always used on this stuff. But, I figured I’d be able to cut some nice straight edges, and use this mat as a template to cut a new one once I acquired the fancy tools to make this look professional. I’ve seen non-bevelled matting, and it looks just fine.

Unfortunately, nice straight edges were not on the agenda for the night. I don’t know what that stuff is made of, but even a brand-new Xacto blade couldn’t go straight through it at any angle. I tried a variety of different techniques, but nothing seemed to work quite right. On the plus side, the edges weren’t unredeemably screwed-up, so I figured I could find a way to fix it afterward. Then, I turned the board over. The front coating on photo mat varies, but in this case, it was just paper. Somehow, the paper had stretched out a bit around the cut, and was sticking out from it like plastic often does when it’s cut with a razor blade. Still, not unredeemable, but after two cuts (out of 12) that took 30 minutes to complete, I realized that I didn’t have time for this.

I took a quick trip to Wal-Mart’s craft section, hoping they’d have something - anything - that could cut a perfectly straight line without having to wrap around the work piece. And, they had something that looked quite promising, a handheld rotary cutter that’s designed to sit on the raised groove of a ruler model by the same company. Perfect! Unfortunately, after scouring the craft section, and taking up a half-hour of the night manager’s time researching this thing, I found out that they didn’t even carry any of the companion rulers for the tool, nor could they find any other Wal-Marts that had them. Oh well, I have miscellaneous materials, I’ll find something! $30 later, I left with the cutter, an extra blade (this mat seemed to be dulling my other blades unusually quickly), and some special double-sided tape strips that looked like they’d come in handy.

So, I started to work again, attempting to make my cuts with this mini-pizza-cutter, guided by a strip of aluminum angle-bracket I was using as a straight-edge. At first, everything seemed just peachy; the cutter was fast, and appeared to make a very nice edge. Unfortunately, appearances are deceiving, and when I flipped the board over, I saw that the outside of the cut wasn’t nearly as straight as the inside, making a wildly irregular wavy pattern. And, as if that wasn’t bad enough, the utterly worthless “safety guard” on the cutter (a spring-loaded plastic piece that sits a full two milimeters from the blade) made a dent in the board in a couple places, on the non-waste part of the mat. In other words, my $15 mat was now trash.

At that point, I decided to say “fuck it” and call it a night, I’ll pick up a new mat on Monday and order a proper cutter (they’re not super-expensive, just impossible to find, and I originally didn’t have the time to order one online). But no, that would’ve let me off easy! In the process of cleaning up, I accidently kicked the glass panel for the frame (it was leaning on a chair, for lack of a safer location), and shattered the entire corner all over the carpet. Just to make things even more fun, most of the broken glass completely disintegrated for some reason.

After having a fit of irrational rage and kicking a chair across the room, I cleaned up the glass as best as I could without a vaccuum (I didn’t want to answer the question of “why are you vaccuuming at 4am?” when I never even do it in the first place), thanks to the magic of duck tape. I don’t know how much it’ll cost to replace the glass panel, but with the other costs involved in un-fucking this project, I’m on the verge of giving up and just giving her the prints to do what she wants with them.

Since the town I live in pretty much doesn’t have any late-night restaurants, and pizza gets tiring, I was quite intrigued to see that Dominos now offers subs. So, I gave them a try. They have Philly Cheese-Steak, Chicken Parmesean, Chicken Bacon Ranch, and my usual favourite, Italian.

Now, a proper Italian sub typically contains a variety of meats, provolone or mozarella cheese, lettuce, tomato, onion, and Italian dressing, among other things. Every restaurant does them differently, but that’s basically what makes this particular sandwich.

Having worked at Dominos before, I should’ve known what to expect. Being the corporate cheap-asses that they are, they decided to start offering sandwiches without shipping any actual sandwich ingredients to their stores (aside from the bread). While that works fine for three of the sandwiches they offer, that doesn’t work for the Italian sub. It has the meat, kinda, and the cheese, but practically no vegetables. I ordered mine without peppers, because I don’t like them, and I realized when I got it that I was left with only onions. Additionally, it had no condiments whatsoever, which kinda kills the point.

Hey, Dominos, congratulations. You’re the first pizza restaurant in the country that can’t make an Italian sub. Nice work.

Tonight, I found out that the only McDonald’s in town that’s open past 2am has switched to the f***ing late-night menu. Which may be fine for some people, but there’s nothing at McDonald’s I actually like except for the Big Mac. And, that’s not on the late-night menu (no one’s been able to give me a plausible explanation as to why, either).

Thus, it’s no longer possible to get anything other than pizza after midnight in this town (not counting the abysmally shitty food at IHOP, or the Waffle House I can’t go to because I can’t eat around smokers). F***ing bullshit for an alleged “college town”, especially one with a reputation for being a “party school”.

On the plus side, I got carded to buy a rated-R movie at Wal-Mart :-).

Shortly after exploring the world of “real” blogging, I decided to look for an RSS reader. Unfortunately, for a relatively well-established technology, there seems to be a significant lack of decent applications for this. Or, at least, there’s a lack of non-website-based RSS solutions.

For one thing, unlike some other people I’ve seen, I don’t keep a browser window open at all times. I open one when I need it, do what I need to do, and close it. And since RSS is meant to make it easy to keep up with frequently-updated websites without actually visiting them, a feed aggregator that relies on visiting a website doesn’t suit my usage habits at all. Likewise, using Firefox’s Live Bookmarks feature doesn’t suit me for the same reason.

My first instinct was to write my own. The Spry Framework from Adobe Labs has an RSS reader with a very nice-looking interface, and it looked promising at first. However, it has several drawbacks. It has no support for Atom feeds, effectively eliminating many sites I wanted to monitor. It also doesn’t auto-update, and it checks every single feed whenever the page is loaded. In other words, a much more primitive solution that it looks.

Some searching brought me to SharpReader. It’s a PC application that acts as a standalone RSS reader, with an interface similar to an email client. It looked like everything I wanted, but their website is highly discouraging. No software updates since 2005, rough-looking site, very minimal content. Granted, it’s not the worst website I’ve seen, but the whole thing looked and felt very outdated, which doesn’t inspire much confidence when evaluating an application.

Thankfully, the application itself is much better than the website led me to believe. Rock-solid reliability, minimal interface without sacrificing user experience (ie, no superfluous shiny crap that’s so common in programs now), intuitive basic functions (options are a bit complex, but anyone can easily figure out how to subscribe to and organize feeds), and minimal resouce usage make this a spectacular application in my book (which is not something I bestow lightly). Plus, it works with pretty much any feed type in existance, and you don’t have to go searching for the URL to the raw RSS. Just enter the website’s URL in your address bar, and if there’s a feed associated with it, SharpReader will find it quickly and easily.

So, despite my initial skepticism, I’ve come to really be fond of SharpReader. It really is everything that an RSS reader should be, and I highly recommend it to anyone interested in using RSS to track websites/blogs/news/whatever.

I keep seeing this commercial, and it really bugs me. Scion’s main selling point seems to be “if you get a Scion, you can put blingy shit on it!”.

How lame does a car have to be for aftermarket customization to be its biggest marketable selling point?

When I was in school, I was always very lazy when it came to doing my homework. And, in math class, this translated into using a calculator for everything once we progressed beyond bare-basics. My mom is a career accountant, and my dad (when he was around) was an entrepreneur with a variety of ventures, so we always had an ample supply of calculators around the house. Coupled with my natural curiousity about gadgets, and I was naturally drawn to these magical devices that made math easy.

As early as the 6th grade, I was doing all of my math homework with a calculator. And, despite the best efforts of my teachers, I maintained that habit, using a calculator quite heavily throughout all of middle and high school. I struggled a bit in my classes; I understood even the most advanced concepts through pre-calculus, but I noticed that I had trouble with basic math. No big deal, though, I always had nice graphing calculators available, where else would I ever need to do math, anyway?

I found the answer to that question in the years after I graduated, as I got out in the world and took on a more independant life. Turns out all those teachers were right, math is used constantly in everyday life. And, due to my maverick attitude in math classes, I was completely unprepared to use math the way I needed to be able to*. I’m currently 23 years old, and I struggle with basic addition and subtraction on a daily basis. Multiplication and division are out of the question without a technological device to do the work for me. And, when I worked as a delivery driver, I found out just how limiting this was; I had to calculate change multiple times a day (down to the penny sometimes, thanks to cheap pricks, but that’s a rant for another time), as fast as possible, entirely in my head. I’m not sure if anyone reading this has had this experience, but there are few experiences that can make one feel like a genuine moron more strongly than taking 2-3 full minutes to calculate change for a $20 bill.

Anyway, I’ve always assumed that I was somewhat of a unique case; schools still teach the same curriculum, right? I screwed up, and did my math work the wrong way in school, but everyone else did it right. Well, apparently that’s changing. I stumbled across this video the other day, and it is downright disturbing (and I don’t even have kids). Apparently, US schools are starting to adopt math curricula that, among other things, encourage significant/almost-exclusive calculator use as early as the 4th grade.

Please watch the whole video; it’s a bit long, and a dry in places, but it’s very intriguing. If nothing else, skip to the end to listen to the producer’s closing words.

YouTube - Math Education: An Inconvenient Truth.

The video was aimed at a localized audience in Washington State, but this is probably going on elsewhere as well. So, if you have kids, and you see them bringing these sorts of math textbooks/assignments home, speak up about it. No matter how far technology advances, every person needs to be able to master at least 7th grade math just to get by in daily life. And no matter how smart your child is, lacking this basic skill will hold them back in a lot of ways. I’m no idiot, by any stretch of the imagination; I can practically write programs in my head, among other skills. But if you saw me trying to calculate the tip at a restaurant, you’d probably guess me to be a high-school dropout with a sanitation career. Don’t let your kids end up like me.

* = This was entirely my fault, and was not the fault of my teachers at all, or the school curriculum. In every math class I took, they did everything they could to break me of my ways, but I was too hard-headed to understand what was going on.