Last Friday there was a pretty strong wind storm that knocked out power a lot of places across Upstate New York. Fortunately my power only went out for about 15 seconds. However, check out how far the lawn chair on my front porch traveled (red circle):
The winds reached 64mph (103 km/h) at the Syracuse's airport. Downtown, a window of One Lincoln Center blew out and fell 12 floors. One woman barely escaped injury:
Read more:
Think about it... Take Christmas, change green to pink (keep the red and white), replace Santa Claus with chocolate, and you get Valentine's Day.
Working at Target has shown me that holidays are nothing but different color crayons shading in stencils. We have a section called "Mini-Seasonal," which contains all the food products and other small accessories for each respective holiday. What really changes as the seasons pass? Not much but the colors. In essentially the exact same spot that you could find christmas cookie cutters, frosting, and sprinkles just two months ago, you can now find the equivalent for Valentine's Day. The shapes of the cutters have changed from trees to hearts, and the frosting and sprinkles have merely changed from green/red/white to pink/red/white. Starting later this week you'll be able to see bunnies and green/yellow/pink. And the cycle continues...
What does my Valentine's Day look like? I start off with a German class, followed by a horribly hard chemistry test. After that it's straight off to another German class and a chemistry recitation. To finish my evening I have a three-hour chemistry lab.
Happy Valentine's Day.
"A catalyst is a substance that increases the rate of reaction without being consumed in the overall reaction."
The Complete Idiot's Guide to Chemistry:
"Catalysts can be compared to my friend Erika (not that you know her). When I was in college, Erika was roommates with a woman named Ingrid. Erika helped to set us up, and I ended up marrying Ingrid. Though Erika was involved in the process (by introducing me to her roommate), she didn't actually take part in the resulting reaction. Therefore she was a catalyst for that process."
Let's say you don't like one of your professors this semester. Shouldn't you be able to give him or her a review online? Apparently Syracuse University doesn't think so.
The Daily Orange's big story yesterday was about four SU freshmen, who, after apparently feeling their writing instructor didn't "know what she's doing ever," started a Facebook group centered around this opinion.
For my readers who haven't heard about Facebook, it's just like MySpace, Friendster, Orkut, hi5, etc., except that it requires a college email address, and the required email addresses have been mostly limited to the U.S., although the U.K. and Mexico are now being invaded as well. More than 80 percent of American college students are members.
Anyway, so these girls started a group on this social network entitled "Clearly [instructor's first name] doesn't know what she's doing ever." As far as the article informed me, there was no threatening terminology to be found anywhere in this group. Besides the four founding members, there were approximately fifteen other students in the group.
To make a long story short, the instructor found out about this group and complained, which eventually led to these four students being placed on disciplinary probation until November of this year. One of them transfered out. Apparently SU has secretly made it a code of conduct violation to publicly criticize professors.
I find this highly alarming. Unfortunately my generation, unlike the one before it, is too passive to do anything about it. This incident differs from most of the hundreds of Facebook news stories that you can find online as it does not involve college administrators using Facebook to catch underage drinkers or to find out about potentially rowdy parties ahead of time. I was alarmed by this story because I feel punishment for non-treatening criticism is just plain wrong.
Apparently things are done a little different at the University of Louisville. There a Facebook group dedicated to criticizing a professor helped lead to the professor being let go. [Read more]
Last Friday night (actually Saturday morning), I was driving home from Fayetteville, the Syracuse suburb where I work. I had worked until about 10:15 and then went to Pizzeria Uno across the parking lot. I left there around 12:35, and around 12:55 I was standing at the traffic light at the corner of Coumbus Ave. and East Fayette Street. This is about one mile from where I live.
There's a bar there called Club DC, and as I was waiting at that traffic light, I suddenly saw about a dozen people streaming out of it, over to a parking lot across the street. The traffic light turned green, and I slowly drove forward, where I noticed they were helping a man lying in the parking lot, very close to the street. I thought he was just lying there from over-consumption of alcohol or something else, and I continued driving home.
Two mornings later, while sitting in the break room at Target and reading the newspaper, an article about Syracuse's first homicide of the year caught my eye. I was shocked to read that that man that I had seen lying on the ground was the victim. He had died at University Hospital shortly after I had seen him.
Unique Visitors: 5625 (New Record)
Number of Visits: 8840 (New Record)
Pages: 39065 (2nd Place)
Hits: 160085 (2nd Place)
Bandwidth: 3.11 GB (New Record)
Top Photo: DSC02637 from "New Year's Eve" (52 Views, Pictured)
Top Countries: United States, Austria, Great Britain, Australia, Switzerland
January was a extremely successful month for newkai.com, fueled by the addition of around 500 photos and four videos between December 24 and January 31.
The bandwidth (data transfered) shattered the previous record of 1.98 GB, set in July 2005, by over a 57 percent, coming in at 3.11 GB. The unique visitor number came in at over twice the record from that same July, while visits broke the record (again from July '05) by nearly 86 percent.
Pages and hits could not keep up with July '05, most likely due to the hundreds of photos that were being posted every week back then, causing many more individual page views and hits.
The most visited sections of my website were AIS2002.COM, followed by my weblog, photos, KaiCams, and videos. The guestbook technically received top honors, but I'm de-qualifying it due to the massive spam attacks it experienced this month. This is the same order as last month, except that the video section shot up out of a much lower rank.
According to Google, my website consists of 951 pages.
