End of Autumn ‘08
Yesterday, Monday, I had the first of two finals for this quarter. Due to how busy I am this quarter, I didn’t get to touch the study guide till Thursday/Friday. I was quite stressed to say the least. However I had a good group of guys to study with on Saturday, Sunday, and Monday (morning). Yeah, I know I was calling it close, but sleeping won over studying the other days.
The class I had the final on was U.S.-China Relations. To most, this seems like a horrifying topic area, but it wasn’t too bad. Only one of the guys, showed up to the Monday morning session. I think the others wanted it to be a literal last minute cram. Since I took the exam before other people, I don’t know if the other two-three showed up. While I spent 8-10 hours on Sunday studying, I was still a bit anxious/nervous 20-30 minutes before the exam, even though I could inter-connect the terms that could be, which was all but two or three.
When I got the exam in front of me, I had a wave of relief came over me. for most parts. The exam had three parts: questions regarding articles in the New York Times, a few terms that had to be defined, then an essay. In the study group, we had covered all the terms and essay prompts pretty in depth. I had gotten up around 5:45 Monday morning. I had just started to review the NYT stuff when I went to have the morning session. Figuring out what articles are important since late October is a bit hard to do. On the terms, I think I did all right, I would have preferred to do some of the others, but what can you do, eh? The essay was the part I was the most nervous about, and that is the part I was the most confident about at the end. I ended up typing a page and a quarter, just about 700 words. The thing I felt great about is that I didn’t BS at all, I guess the conclusion could be a smidge better.
Now back to studying. –Ryan
Google SearchWiki
I just did quick search, and saw all these extra icons. After finishing my search, I went to the Google Blog to see what was all this stuff. It turns out that all that extra stuff is Google’s new feature called SearchWiki. SearchWiki allows users to put certain items at the top of the list if they always click result 5 for x search. After watching the video about SearchWiki feature, I thought of several questions:
- Wait a minute, I thought the “My Web History” stuff was supposed to rearrange stuff for me – yes I know SearchWiki is instantaneously.
- I thought marking a result as a bookmark also does this.
- How do I undelete/unremove a search? It’s bound to happen, "Shoot! I meant to hit bump, but I hit the x". I didn’t see an undo button anywhere
- How much extra do screen reader users have to listen to?
- Can I turn this off? Kind of cluttersome
- Are bumped results tied to Google Bookmarks?
- Will bumped results from all users affect general search results?
- What happened to the Google Bookmarks or rather, where’d the bookmark star go?
Sad for Americans
Dear Americans,
I come to you not as a McCain supporter, or Obama supporter, but as an individual who put facts together. This will be quite harsh of an entry, and will seem like I am a disgruntled McCain supporter. I am whole-heartily not. I already had a person I went to college with call me a piece of shit for not being a pro-Obama guy. So let’s begin.
I am quite sad that the United States has picked Barack Obama for the 44th President of the United States. Basically he is the lesser of two evils, in my mind. I am not saying that Obama is an evil man or whatever negative connotation you want to spin on it. What I am saying, is out of the two main candidates, he is the better one. Although I do not think that he will be a good president at this moment.
Gmail: Themes
I logged into Gmail for the first time since about noon Wednesday, I saw that there was something new. THEMES! I am not sure how I feel about them really, I know that there are a few things I would like to see happen prior to these. However, most people like to make things pretty before they are fully functional yet. I know my sister is certainly that way, she is constantly changing her MySpace display picture.
Anyway, I looked at a handful of the themes, and I was undecided. The ones I looked at pretty much got a thumbs down. The one that would bring out the inner geek, Terminal, was disappointing. I could not tell which e-mails were new versus which were read due to the very slight change in greens. The others had similar issues, not enough contrast. This especially came out with the links into e-mails. The color was just too light, I cannot tell if it just was that it matched the background too closely or what. I have it on cold shower right now, but I will see howthe planets theme looks later today when it will be lighter. Planets is the theme of my personal Google page, so hopefully the theme will look decent around 10/11 am.
By the way, hello. I was on a long hiatus from blogging, I don’t have any real excuse why I didn’t this summer, I have been quite busy with school since the end of September. I have been working on a post about the election, hopefully I can get that done in the next few days.
[edit]: While I was little bummed to see that the planets theme did not change, it gets a thumbs down. Google or whoever made the theme, did not apply a new color to the active arrow. So a black arrow on a black (or dark navy) background, doesn’t work too well.