dream concert @ 12:08 pm

I almost forgot about this but next weekend M.I.A. and GIRL TALK are playing at Brown!!!!!!

This has been my personal dream since I came to Brown. I requested Girl Talk when Brown Concert Agency did a survey back in 2005. In previous years we have gotten the Wrens, Wilco, Ted Leo and the Pharmacists, the Roots, the Flaming Lips and RJD2 (not to mention OK Go at least 3 times — the lead singer went to Brown)…but none of those get me as excited as Girl Talk in terms of pure joy entertainment delight value. The only way this concert could be any better would be if the Knife turned up as a secret special guest, or if Justice was the opening act.

Funnily enough this happy turn of events is probably thanks to BCA booking chair David Horn, otherwise known as a guy I had math with at B-CC and Westland, and one of the two people in my high school class accepted into Brown as a freshman.

Edit: I wonder if Girl Talk will use M.I.A. samples while opening for M.I.A. and all our heads will explode.

tags: b-cc, live, music

34 @ 3:17 pm

The Washington Post ranked public high schools and my high school B-CC comes in at 34. Pretty impressive. It seems a bit skewed towards schools in our area. How could so many be in the top 100 public schools in the country?

tags: b-cc, webloggish

thoughts of the day @ 8:24 pm

If only our university-issue dorm room chairs didn’t have arms, I would a) be able to push my chair all the way under my desk when I am not using it and b) sit cross-legged on my chair. Alas.

I went to my new Econ section today. I didn’t like the TA as much as the old one but everything else is more interesting. It is on the second floor of Smith-Buonanno in a room that appears from the inside to be suspended in the top part of a large lecture hall on the floor below. Hard to describe. I will have to take pictures. For now, here is a flash slideshow of the building, which won some fancy architecture awards. You can see my classroom in the second and third pictures — that big box over the lectern area.

Also cool about my section: at least half of the class is comprised of international students . I’ve never had such a huge variety of accents in any of my other classes in college. I guess economics is a field that appeals to everyone? It reminded me of high school. Come to think of it, the classroom reminded me of high school as well.

tags: b-cc, class

subjective @ 10:32 am

The end of summer has left me uninspired. In desperation I am turning to the Vox Question of the Day for fodder. Yesterday’s question:

What was (or is) your favorite subject in school?

Too easy, right? Brown’s open curriculum has allowed me to take exactly what I want to take and it appears that Philosophy and Political Science (especially theory-based) are my favorite classes. More generally, my favorite subject in school is discussion. Anything that can be discussed — social sciences and humanities. I can find science, math, languages and the other technical subjects which are more about facts (at least not until the more advanced classes) are harder for me to grasp because they feel less real, in a way. Maybe relevant is a better word. I haven’t found a good way to relate to the disciplines, and so they remain both difficult and boring for me (although I think most of the reason they are boring are because I don’t really understand what is going on past a superficial level).

I’m trying to branch out a bit this semester because I feel like I am missing out. I’m taking baby steps. I know that interdisciplinary technical-type subjects like logic appeal to me. I’m going to give economics a try, and a cognitive scinece class on the evolution of human language.

In high school my favorite subjects were English, History, Programming (! but it was Visual Basic so it was nice and simple and logical, no object-orientation confusion), Photography and Humanities (closest I could get to philosophy, I suppose). My least favorite subjects were Spanish (mostly because of speaking — I enjoyed reading literature and writing about it), Math (I liked Calculus because it brought everything together, but that was it) and Science.

tags: b-cc, class, pensieve

a very big building @ 8:52 am

I had a dream that I went to Vassar with McComas and Henry. Except, instead of being outside it was a wing on a high floor of a new version of my high school, that wasn’t in Maryland but Minnesota or some other state. The building was enormous and the stairs were so steep between floors that you pretty much had to take the elevator unless you wanted a real work out. One floor had buildings within buildings, and a kind of townsquare in the middle of it. For some reason I was looking for Ithaca College. I had to press a button marked “E” to get to it. But then once I got there it was Vassar. Katie and Henry were there and they knew their way around. We went to a concert in one of the classrooms with Pearl Jam except there was no Eddie Vedder. And then it turned out Mike went to Vassar, and Ben. The entire school was indoors and contained in this wing of the huge high school building. At this Vassar, there were all these smaller colleges within the school and you had to apply to one after your freshman year and then you spent the rest of your time within that sub-school. All the sub-schools had funny names that I could not pronounce. Mike was happy becaues he had gotten into one called “V-W” for short (Verney-Wooley?). I asked Henry which one he had gotten into before he had transfered out and he said something about the fine-arts college. I think McComas had gotten into one of the sub-schools with a name that sounded like gibberish. She mentioned something about losing her Vassar day pass, and I realized that I had never got one.

And that’s all I can remember, I think.

tags: b-cc, dreams, friends

yearbook project @ 10:13 pm It has finally happened. I have started to digitize my high school yearbook photographs. It is very exciting. I don’t know why I didn’t think of this before. The value of digitization probably never occurred to me before I started working at CDI. I’m scanning the photos at 300 dpi. Nothing compared to the 600 dpi that images were scanned at for CDI, but still more than the 200 dpi that my scanning program recommended for photographs. I’m learning some good habits. Recording metadata. The rolls are organized in folders numbered chronologically, the file names are based on captions. In Flickr I am recording additional text that I originally wrote next to the photograph, or anything extra that occurs to me as I sift through them. I have only finished four rolls worth of photos so far which comes out to 57 photos (only about half of each roll ever made the cut for the yearbook). A long way to go for senior year, and even longer if I decide to also digitize junior and sophomore years. I am hoping that now the people who would look at my yearbook during class in high school can find the photos and look at them any time they want, anywhere.

I suppose I am also hoping that this inspires me to take more pictures next year at Brown. At GWU I took a miserable single roll of film. The first half was from the very beginning of the year before I had given up on the place and when I was still optimistic that I would be happy and have lots of friends and know enough people that I felt comfortable around to actually make a real yearbook. Didn’t happen. I took some at Brown but nothing compared to my high school yearbooks, probably because they are all digital to begin with and I don’t have the satisfaction of sorting picking up the photos from CVS like they are a present and sorting through them and cutting them and arranging them and sticking them in a black sketchbook.

I forgot to mention this yesterday but I started reading The Da Vinci Code again. I still can’t get over how badly it is written, but this time I read far enough in one sitting to get hooked. I like being in the middle of a book. It always gives me something else I could be doing, something to do, a purpose. The trouble with this book is that it is going way too fast. I did find some of Mummy’s old college books which will be dry and academic but perhaps interesting and should last a lot longer than junk-food-esqueDa Vinci.

Mummy has started to call Charlie “Zack” by mistake sometimes.

tags: animals, b-cc, books, gwu, photography, web