The World of Stuff .com

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This semester’s schedule has been pretty easy to get used to: class, work, lunch, class, work. The only thing that’s odd is living off campus. I can’t just go home if I have a free period. Moving from a dorm to an apartment is like moving from a summer camp to a house… sort of. I’m away all day, anyway.

On the bus, I pass by my dormitory of two years, Hume Hall. I notice that they’ve done some landscaping, and I wonder how they could have afforded it if there’s some sort of budget crisis going on. I also think about the friends I made there last year. Many of them have returned to Hume and tried to get rooms on the same floor. All in all, I made more friends there last year than I did the year before. They were mostly freshmen last year, but they felt like equals to me.

Work has been good. I’m still the Dean of Students Office webmaster, a job I got to keep over the summer thanks to the miracle of the Internet. This week, I finally got to meet the new graphic artist, who started while I was gone. I would e-mail her from Europe because sometimes I needed to work with images, and I didn’t want to risk installing the GIMP on the little netbook that Andy and I had bought.

The big project at work lately has been moving sections of the web site to their own subdomains per an organizational shake-up. Much of this was done over the summer by another webmaster in the department. The work was finally finished yesterday. Now the web site I’m responsible for is smaller, but this just marks another chapter in my webmasterdom. The Interim Dean of Students has some ideas for improving the web site, and I have some of my own. Can I say this stuff? Probably. I’m not giving away state secrets or anything.

One of my new professors says the key to success with schoolwork is to have it on your mind constantly. But at the end of the first week of the semester, that’s the last thing I want to think about. Last night, I did something I don’t do very much at all: I channel-surfed. Back-to-back Family Guy, car chases, Joe Biden eulogizing Ted Kennedy, The Land Before Time, a live-action show on Cartoon Network, an old college football game, news about kidnapped people, Tropic Thunder, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Al Jazeera, Craig Ferguson’s stand-up. Who says Friday night TV is a wasteland?

Sugar Stacks lets you see how much sugar is in popular foods. (Via The Presurfer)

Did you know you can easily create a book of Wikipedia articles? PediaPress makes it possible.

A ’50s-style instructional film: Facebook Manners and You. (Via The Presurfer)