Getting organized

If you've been here before, you'll probably notice that today I've added a couple pages at the top (About the Author and Topics). These are just to tell the readers what the blog is about, again hoping to make it more inviting to new readers. My idea wasn't to sumarize what this blog has been or will be, but to allow easier navigation for the people who visit this blog (and, trust me, in the future navigation could get really complicated since you can't really nest one label inside another, and I plan to do something of the sort for some Big Things yet to come.)

Special occasions on (the) line

Avatar story: Next ⇨ | Latest ↠

It’s important to have traditions. Very important. (I’ll explain later why I say this so categorically, just bear with me for now.) This year I started a tradition, and it was also a pretty strong force in convincing me to create this blog. No, it’s not in my first post, so don’t look for it. This tradition was to change my avatar at certain special times of year to tell a small story.

Obligatory World Cup post

As you very likely are aware, the South Africa World Cup started today, completely changing everyone's attitude and priorities. TVs were placed all over the campus, in every student lounge, making it more of a "lounging about" room and less of a "actually getting work done" room.

Poor naïve little me, having not gone to student lounges during the last World Cup, actually thought I could isolate myself from the games, and work on my projects. As the way the sentence is constructed may lead you to think, I was wrong.

I tried, I really did, to work on my projects, but there was no way to escape the "Ooooh!"s and "Goaaaaaal!"s  and especially the "Shit, man!"s. After all, I am human, and the temptation to find out how the match was going was way to great. In the end, I ended up watching both games in their entirety, and regretted it.

"Sure," you probably say; "now he regrets not working on the huge projects he's got due next week. He regretted it because he's gonna be stressed out all weekend! But when he was watching the opening match –savor that for a moment: the... opening... match!– he surely wasn't regretting it! He's just being a hypocrite!" Well, no. I regretted it because I found the matches shitty.

Fifa.com

Linking to the future

Many of the posts I've made so far were planned for from the beginning of this blog; I simply didn't want them to appear yet, for fear that in some future week I may have nothing to post (last week was one such week, but since I had something pre-written, that's what went up, although it wasn't planned from the beginning). To make this more apparent and easier to navigate, I've gone through several of my old posts and added links to the posts that came after, expanding on them (my first post, for instance, says "more about this later"; which now links to the post that came after giving the "more about this").

I'll try to keep doing this with posts yet to come (linking them from an old post, I mean) to try to make the overall blog easier to read, more inviting to new readers, and to incite you to re-read though the old posts every once in a while

Mouse avatar: Ears, nose, and mouth

Last week I told you I was cheating when I showed you the ears, mouth, and nose before it was time. This week I’m going to show you why it wasn’t that much so.

When I started with the ears, I thought I could fake it by drawing a circle á là Mickey Mouse. This didn’t work out so well.

I therefore turned to tracing again. Because the image was so dark, there were two places that could be the top edge of the ear. I went with the one closest to the center under the justification that rounder is cuter. However, there was still something that bothered me about the result.

Fortibus Es

Last Saturday, May 22, I went to the library to meet with my partner so we could work on a project. As I've explained before, my college is quite removed from the city. It therefore has a whole fleet of buses used to take students between the city and campus. (Of course, you can always bring your car, but some 60% of the people who come to this college don't own one... long story.)

We had no problem getting to the library, it was getting back that was the problem. The library opens on Saturdays until midday; there's usually a bus at 12:30 for the people who need to come to it. But there we were at the bus stop, and 12:30 came and went. The logical question arose: where is our bus?

At that point, I told my partner the following:

Luc síbili si ergo, faustus üin don mon dei; pas fortibus es in aro.

This was obviously a reference to http://foribuses.com/. My partner didn't get it, even when I wrote it, so I had to explain: Luc síbili (Look, see Billy) si ergo (see her go) faustus üin (fast as wind) don mon dei (on Monday) pas fortibus es (past fourty busses) in aro (in a row).
My point? There may be no busses now, but on Monday there will be more than fourty!

When he got it, he said something along the lines of "that was so funny I forgot to laugh."

The bus finally arrived at 1:00; having been asked to wait for some course for non-students.

Crisis nominally over

Our granters (or whatever you call the people who give grants) have analyzed the situation, and audited every last penny my college has spent to make sure it was being spent correctly (it was). The granters, as a whole,  can grant more money, but due to the lengthy processes it must undergo, none of it would be available before October.

The funny thing is, apparently they had already provided the money for the rest of the year, but the board refused to spend it because it had been given on the condition that it wasn't to be spent until September; spending it before then would constitute embezzlement. It would also just postpone the crisis until later on in the year.