I spent a fun-filled two days working on a take-home midterm for one of my classes. In the midst of thinking about homophily, weak ties, power laws, clustering coefficients, and degree distributions, I decided that I needed to document the toll that the midterm was taking on my coffee table.
My coffee table still hasn’t completely recovered from the aftermath.
Here are the rest of the photos that I took during yesterday’s Detroit Bus Tour (sponsored by CIC and SI). I took lots of photos but ended up deleting most of them. It turns out that taking photos from the inside of a bus with dirty windows is even harder than taking photos while driving on the freeway at 70+ miles per hour.
Aside from the lack of appropriate photo documentation opportunities, the bus trip was awesome. It gave me a totally different perspective on Detroit. So much of the city’s architectural history should (and must) be perserved and revitalized.
I spent most of yesterday touring Detroit as part of a bus tour sponsored by CIC and SI. It was pretty awesome, although we saw so much that a lot of it is blending in my mind at the moment. The highlight of the tour for me was checking out the Heidelberg Project. I didn’t take as many photos of the project as I would have liked to because:
Fitster, the conceptual prototype that Andy, Matt, Diana, and I developed last semester for our infoviz project, has been accepted into the first round of the CHI Student Design Competition. Diana and I were both working on schoolwork in the DIAD this afternoon when we found out. I had just logged off and was about to leave when Diana shrieked, “Noor! CHI!” She started reading the notification email and I quickly logged back in so that I could check my email (it wasn’t going to sink in until I started reading it for myself). Needless to say, trying to concentrate in class tonight was super super hard. My mind was elsewhere. I’m still so giddy with excitement!
Not only did I give a presentation about blogs in 688, I now have photographic evidence of the spectacle, courtesy of my press corps.
Dear obnoxious undergrad who sat next to me in class tonight:
Dude!!! Why the heck are you taking this graduate level class? You don’t need to take it and you obviously don’t seem all that interested in it. You abruptly walked out of class a half hour early during the past two class sessions. Tonight, you stayed the whole time (shocking!) but you were reading the Blue Book (of all things) during lecture. WTF?!? Can’t you find better reading material? I would have had a little more respect for you if you at least brought a copy of Maxim or something. But the Blue Book?
WTF!?!
And even after spending most of the class period reading the Blue Book, you have the audacity to ask obnoxious questions . . . like you do every class session!
Thanks for making me feel like I’m in high school again.
Sincerely,
Noor
I’m giving a presentation about blogs in 688 right now!
In one of my classes this week, I was shocked and awed when I received an actual objective numeric grade for a homework assignment. This assignment was NOT graded on the always entertaining check, check+, check- system or its even more entertaining cousin the check++, check–, check, check-, check+, + circle, check good, check excellent, use your own imagination with checks/numbers/pluses and minuses system.
Apparently, the “please use an obscure grading system” memo has yet to reach our professor’s mailbox. In the meantime, I believe I have the tremors and hives under control.
How long should I stick around a class that I don’t even have to take and is turning out to be pretty useless?
Maybe it will get better?
Maybe I should have stayed home and worked through my book instead?
You know you’ve been in the DIAD for too long when the voice of the ugli god comes on the intercom telling you that you may need to show a valid UM id to stay in the ugli past midnight.
