September 2006
Grammar woes
I’ve been editing group member’s papers all week for a report we are doing. I’ve run across a few little things that annoy me.
The internet is killing english as we know it. People are just so used to typing to their friends that they don’t bother to edit or think about what they are typing.
Example #1: “the fact” I saw too many uses of “the fact” in their papers. An example of this would be “He walked down the street despite the fact that there was a monster following him.” You do not need “the fact” the fixed sentence would be “He walked down the street even though a monster was following him.”
Example #2: The professor told us that because these are application letters for potential jobs, we should not use words like “I feel” or “I think” we should use “I know”. I corrected at least 20 total instances of “I feel”
Example #3: dangling participles. Don’t end your sentences with “of”
Example #4: But, And. Don’t start your sentences with these words.
Example #5: Do not use contractions in a formal paper.
Example #6: Since is not a replacement work for Because. Since describes a place in time. That’s it’s only acceptable use. “He went to the store since he was hungry.” “He went to the store because he was hungry.”
Y2K
awesome, now I’m learning the intricacy of Y2K in one of my CIS classes. I’m really glad that I need to pay a ton of money to take an upper level class where I learn about something that not only happened almost 7 years ago, but didn’t happen!
Now he just told us that this all happened “like 5 or 6 years ago” YES
We had an assignment due today and I got a ton of emails from fellow students this weekend asking how to sort a pivot table in excel. I mean emails where people were saying they just spent the last 2 hours trying to figure it out.
I didn’t know what a pivot table was until I started the assignment, and the whole assignment took me 15 minutes to do. 15 cause I did it at home and had distractions. How I figured out how to sort a pivot table? Well, first I clicked on help, and typed “pivot table” then I read how to make one. Then I got stuck, not knowing how to sort…. what do you think I did?
Of course I panicked and immeaditaly emailed everyone in the class.
Or maybe I typed “sort pivot table” in the office help section? Nawwww that would be too hard.
It’s like back in the days before J.F.G.I. became my motto. I used to get people sending me instant messages asking a fairly simple question. I would copy and paste their exact quote into yahoo or google, take the first returned page and copy and paste that answer. Thanks to Evan, I just type JFGI it back to them. I’ll just tell you that one of those letters stands for Google.
Redbull Offices
The offices for Redbull just might be the coolest place I’ve seen.
Sufjan Stevens – The Raconteurs
I just got in from seeing Sufjan Stevens and the Raconteurs tape their episodes of Austin City Limits tonight, and it was a really really great experience.
We (Mark, LeAnne, Rachel, and I) showed up at about 3 to get in line to get tickets (this is after Mark and I raced over to Waterloo on friday night when they announced the where to pickup standby tickets. Our standby tickets garunteed us a place in line to wait for real tickets. Our group were people 16-20 in line. So we got our tickets to go in to the taping. The studio is sooooooo much smaller than I thought it would be, it only holds 320 people.
Sufjan took the stage with 14 backing musicians ranging from trumpet to violin to triangle. He played all my favorites, a new song, and told some really great stories. I hope everything makes it to air. I also think I’m going to be on the air a little, cause we were really close to the stage. That’s gonna be crazy, I’ll post screen caps of myself when the episodes air.
The Raconteurs took the stage, and since this was my first time to ever see Brendan Benson live, It was also my first time to realize how skinny he is. No wonder his band is called Brendan Benson and the Well Fed Boys…. cause they must eat all his food (thanks leanne for that one). Their set was amazing, only had a few hitches, and we got to listen to Blue Veins 3 and a half times, and Hands twice fully through. It was cool to see Brendan Benson stopping Jack White in the middle of Jack White going crazy on the guitar and stage so they could start the song over. One time Jack White stopped Brendan during a quasi-solo so they could do the song over. Brendan just looks at Jack and was like “MAN! I WAS ON FIRE!” hahaha.
Well, we weren’t supposed to take pictures, and I even saw a guy get his phone confisgated for taking pictures. But I really had to have something to show you people how close I was to the stage.
I hope I don’t get sued or something for having this picture up.
Indie Movie Trailer
This trailer proves that you don’t have to make a good movie to have a good indie trailer. It’s all about slowmo and music choice. Basically this Troll 2 trailer is amazing. More amazing than the movie? maybe.
(no, the movie is better)
silent google homepage update
I love it when google silently updates something. This time it’s if you use the personalized google homepage, they’ve added tabs to it.
Really handy cause when I’m at work I use a different set of rss feeds than I use at home. Now I have a home and a work tab. Oh google, you rule. Now just come out with GoogleNotes and I’ll be the happiest person on earth. constantly while I’m at work I’ll come across a site, or need to copy and paste something from one computer to another, and having an instance of a notepad type website opened up on both would be really nice. I guess I could use google spreadsheet, but just make google word already.
Idiocracy
I know I don’t have a huge following of readers, but a travesty is happening right now. The new Mike Judge movie, which was shot over two years ago, was held on to by Fox for unknown reasons. And for some reason, they released the movie about 2 weeks ago, unannounced, no marketing, nothing. That’s right, Mike Judge’s follow up to the instant classic Office Space is getting ignored by all of America. So if you’re reading this, and are somewhere in range of the few theaters showing this movie Please go see it before it’s out of theaters and slowly pushed to dvd.
Look at the cast for this movie! How could you lose?! Idiocracy IMDB page
So yeah, go see it.
The War at Home
Everybody, don’t forget, season 2 of The War at Home starts tomorrow night on Fox. YAY!
Banksy Hit Disneyland
Lame Drivers
Wow, I’m so ahead of the curve this time. I didn’t realize that. I just submitted the album info to the CDDB (it’s been a LONG LONG time since I did that), and was one of the first people to listen to all the tracks on last.fm