Missing Rice student found in... Dwinelle?

I always thought Dwinelle was a black hole, and now that Rice University student Matthew Wilson was found there recently, my suspicions are confirmed.

Sure, his car may have been found on Allston Way in June, but by that point he had probably already been sucked into the depths of Dwinelle, never to be seen again until 8 months later.

I would not be surprised if he had lived there the entire eight months he was missing. Who would notice? And even if some lost freshman did recognize him and care (unlikely), how would the finder lead the police to him? Telekinesis?

Cleaning up

You may have noticed I updated the blogroll to reflect Websites that actually exist or get updated on a moderately regular basis, and also to reflect the sites I actually read (for the most part). About the time I slowed down on the blogging, I also slowed down on reading blogs. Perhaps there's a correlation, but I still haven't caught up to all of my old bookmarks yet.

I also changed the title and description again, because (big surprise) I'm procrastinating and the previous one was stupid. Not that this is much of an improvement, but I'm more satisfied with it at the moment.

Now I'm off to scrub the stove and clean the bathroom and the other two square feet of apartment, because there's no better way to procrastinate than to please one's roommate with one's cleanliness.

And I didn't graduate early because....?

I know this is totally unprofessional of me, and I promise it won't happen again, but anonymously vent I will. This on-campus job I applied for* in mid-July asked for a phone interview yesterday, to which I happily agreed because it's a job I would enjoy doing and I think I could do it pretty well.

I was so excited about it that I told the good people who offered me a different, lower-paying job at a café this morning that I'd have to wait and see about this other job first. Then the campus job (that took forever even to give me an interview) tells me they can't hire me because I'm a student.

Isn't that illegal?

I don't have the time, energy or willingness to devote to fighting it, but I'm annoyed that a job I would have done just as competently as an outside contractor (and for lower pay because it's a university) isn't available to me on grounds synonymous with "my paycheck would go right back to the university."



*by "applied for," I mean did about $50 of sample work for free, explained why and how I did the work in the cover letter, and researched relevant competitors. At least now I have an unpublished writing sample? Though I will be supremely peeved if they use the work anyway.

UPDATE: I've done some Googling, and it appears that my position as a student would not preclude me from entering an independent contract with the university, but my current employment with the university (in a different capacity) would.

Yes, the white girl said it.

Ok, look. I don't want to make waves or anything, but I am glad Prop 209 was passed in California and I'm sticking to it.

I harbor no enmity against the family I've left over at the Clog, but I will heartily disagree with the sentiments expressed in this post.

I don't disagree that minorities have had problems because they're minorities, and some of those problems have contributed to making it more difficult to afford college. But whether or not minorities are more prone to these problems than people of other races, a person's racial status shouldn't factor into his or her merit as a student.

Does this make me an evil conservative? I don't know. But as someone who has been economically disadvantaged as a result of her race-- yes, the white girl said it-- I am tired of people assuming that race, socioeconomic status, and opportunity are necessarily correlative.

Maybe I'm missing something besides eligibility for 85% of available scholarships.

The Complicated Drama of Photosharing

You know, I've been under pressure to put my photos online, and I finally got around to uploading the European photos to Flickr. I'm sort of cheap, so I stuck with the free account-- to which one can only upload 100MB of photos per month-- and figured I would wait to upload more pictures until the next month. In general I don't take that many pictures, except I took a ton when I was abroad, so really I just need somewhere to put what would otherwise be several year's worth of photographs in one place besides my computer.

So now that it's August 3 and there's homework to procrastinate, I decided to upload another set of photos out of my several thousand from the last six months. Until I discovered that the free account has a totally stupid limit (not just per month) of total space.

And that's when I decided to switch to Google's Picasa. It's going to be a lot of work to re-do everything I've already done to Flickr on Picasa, but I'm annoyed enough that I did all that work just to discover I couldn't keep the free account.

In any case, I don't know that all of my pictures will fit on Picasa, either, but at the moment I know it's more than Flickr's willing to offer. Another reason why Google is totally going to win the battle against Yahoo, whenever that comes to fruition.

Final countdown

Now, before any of you two or three get all huffy, I just thought I would clarify the edits I've made to the blog while I'm procrastinating writing another paper. Why I am writing a paper in July is another story for another day.

I'm ambivalent about maintaining this blog because, well, I haven't really done a very good job of it in the last year or so. The archives are pretty fun, especially the parts before I told my mom about it, but I just seem to have lost the energy to write as regularly. Right now it's sort of a "whenever-I-feel-like-it-or-when-something-is-due" blog, and that's not reliably readable. I do want to write about my travels, though, but maybe that's for another day.

I still reserve the right to begin blogging regularly in the offchance that me publishing that I am considering stopping will subconsciously change my mind.

In any case, "final countdown" still seems to capture the "old" vision of "old lady syndrome," since aren't all old ladies just in their own final countdown, anyway?

At least that's the story I'll stick to when I delete this post and begin regular posting again.

I'd say 'stay tuned,' but I think that's a bit disingenuous.

Big surprise

Wait, the people who had a right to do stuff to their own property won three lawsuits that challenged them?

Who knew justice could be so cruel?!

It would seem the hippies just invested hundreds of thousands of dollars (on their end and the end they're repaying the university) to come to the same conclusion the university made when it decided to cut down some trees in the first place.