According to Yahoo, the weather in Seoul today is 30 degrees and hazy. Yeah, sounds about right. This morning the custodian came to clean the air-con unit in the office where my desk is located, which encouraged me at the time. The problem is, they still haven’t turned it on. The staff seems to instead prefer to open the door and all the windows, so we can hear every little noise in the hallways and in the schoolyard. A neighboring teacher has also gone to lunch and left the radio at her desk on, just to add a little extra annoyance I guess. The next six weeks are gonna suck.
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So now that my paper is finished I only have to do the final exam and I’ll be done with the course. The exam isn’t too difficult, but will take a fair amount of time. It’s basically 10 essay questions, averaging around 300 words each. I’ve already done the first question, and started on the second. These two require the longest responses. It’s due on June 19, so my plan is to try and complete one question per day. I won’t always make it, but as long as I shoot for one a day there will be enough time to allow for a slow day here and there. God help me, but I had decided I definitely would not take any courses next semester, but now I’m thinking maybe I should. The next course in my cycle isn’t offered during third semester, so that would mean waiting until next March to take another course. Too long. Anyway, it should be easier now, shouldn’t it? I should have more of a grip on thinking and writing academically, find resources, doing proper citations, and most importantly, planning and pacing myself so I don’t flip out whenever an assignment is due. Right? Even so there is still one major hitch to this thing. That is, summer camp and my vacation will occur right about the time the first paper is due. I think trying to do research and write a paper in the middle of camp would be challenging at best and, far more likely, might be impossible.
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Things on the Internet don’t impress me that much anymore, but every once in a while something comes a long that is worth giving some respect to. I’m talking here about a site called Pandora.com, which apparently was born out of something called the Music Genome Project. What you do is input the name of a song you like, or an artist, and the program finds similar songs it thinks you’ll like and plays them for you. You can tell it whether you like the song or not, and that helps it to refine your preferences and increase the likelihood you will like the songs it suggests. For me, the really mind-blowing thing about this is that it doesn’t go by the genre of the music. It looks at different properties like the key, vocal style, rhythm and stuff like that. I’ve been playing with it for a couple of days now, and I’d estimate it plays just one song I hate for every 10 that I like. It says it’s only open to US residents for now, but all you have to do is enter a US postal code when you register. Try 10101 (Manhattan), or 86411 (Provo, UT), or 90210 (do you have to ask?). Anyway, I love it. It’s changing the way I listen to music, the same way the iPod did.
***
So now that my paper is finished I only have to do the final exam and I’ll be done with the course. The exam isn’t too difficult, but will take a fair amount of time. It’s basically 10 essay questions, averaging around 300 words each. I’ve already done the first question, and started on the second. These two require the longest responses. It’s due on June 19, so my plan is to try and complete one question per day. I won’t always make it, but as long as I shoot for one a day there will be enough time to allow for a slow day here and there. God help me, but I had decided I definitely would not take any courses next semester, but now I’m thinking maybe I should. The next course in my cycle isn’t offered during third semester, so that would mean waiting until next March to take another course. Too long. Anyway, it should be easier now, shouldn’t it? I should have more of a grip on thinking and writing academically, find resources, doing proper citations, and most importantly, planning and pacing myself so I don’t flip out whenever an assignment is due. Right? Even so there is still one major hitch to this thing. That is, summer camp and my vacation will occur right about the time the first paper is due. I think trying to do research and write a paper in the middle of camp would be challenging at best and, far more likely, might be impossible.
***
Things on the Internet don’t impress me that much anymore, but every once in a while something comes a long that is worth giving some respect to. I’m talking here about a site called Pandora.com, which apparently was born out of something called the Music Genome Project. What you do is input the name of a song you like, or an artist, and the program finds similar songs it thinks you’ll like and plays them for you. You can tell it whether you like the song or not, and that helps it to refine your preferences and increase the likelihood you will like the songs it suggests. For me, the really mind-blowing thing about this is that it doesn’t go by the genre of the music. It looks at different properties like the key, vocal style, rhythm and stuff like that. I’ve been playing with it for a couple of days now, and I’d estimate it plays just one song I hate for every 10 that I like. It says it’s only open to US residents for now, but all you have to do is enter a US postal code when you register. Try 10101 (Manhattan), or 86411 (Provo, UT), or 90210 (do you have to ask?). Anyway, I love it. It’s changing the way I listen to music, the same way the iPod did.
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