December 22, 2005
WOU Jukebox
There's a really cool service available from Western Oregon University to listen to streaming music from one of the school's servers. There's a surprisingly large amount of very different music available and it sure makes work shifts go a lot more smoothly. It's easy to search for groups or songs and the list of music includes not only popular rock music but also classical, opera, jazz, and other genre's and categories. Very cool tool. Thought I'd put it up here so folks can know about it.
(DISCLAIMER: I'm a student at WOU and I also am a student worker for their University Computing Services division. I mention this in my capacity as a student, not a student worker.)
Posted by morr at 05:53 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Yay for Grades! (I can't believe I just typed that)
Got my grades back. Did better than I expected, honestly. Two B's, a B+ and an A-. Not too bad for a term where I thought I got my ass kicked.
Hopefully I can manage next term too. I've still got about a year of school left before I'm done, so I'm hoping to crank out as many required credits as possible as quickly as possible without driving myself insane. Wish me luck.
Posted by morr at 05:39 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
December 19, 2005
School v. "real life"
Just got Grades back. Two B's, one B+, and one A-. I'm a pretty happy guy right now. Just a few more terms to go and I'm all done with two degrees. Man, I hope I can make it through. Every term making myself go to class and do homework gets harder.
The issue isn't that I don't enjoy learning or that the subject matter isn't interesting. It's just that sometimes... well sometimes I just don't care what Heidegger had to say on the subject of modern technology (which is a whole different rant in itself). I just want to sleep in and play WoW. Of course, this makes me not too different from most college students I guess, but sometimes I really miss the days when I could just get up, go to work, come home, and be DONE.
I took two years off between High School and College and I'm really glad I did. I got to go out and experience a lot of life that I think I would have missed if I'd have gone straight to school. Granted some of those experiences were less than positive, but life's not just made up of happy goodness so I really don't mind too much in retrospect.
The downside to that time off is that I got to realize that the "real world" isn't really as tough as everyone makes it out to be. Now don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that the "work a day world" is easy or anything. But people do tend to make it sound like when you get out of college you're going to have to beat people with a stick to get through life and it's just not so.
So anyhow, in some ways I miss the definate boundries between the different facets of life that the "real world" gives. School's great in a lot of ways but one thing that can get annoying to me is that every little aspect of college life bleeds into all others.
My work schedule is dictated by my class schedule which is dictated by how long I've been in school and what classes I've passed. In turn my social relationships are dictated by the combination of these two schedules as well as how much homework my profs have assigned and my friends schedules are ruled the same way. It just makes things pretty damned complicated. In the "real world" you tend to only have work dictating your schedule. Depending on age you may have kids and some people have church responsibilities to factor in, but still, those things are mostly independant of eachother and you get to choose exactly how you prioritize and arrainge those responsibilities. The fact that most people don't realize this (or at least don't act like they realize it) is largely irrelevant.
Anyhow, this is one long ramble because I was up until 3am with insomnia last night and had to be at work early this morning. So yeah.
Posted by morr at 11:14 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack