New Year, new WP, new term, new books

January 4th, 2006

I hope you all had a good New Year’s. :biggrin:

Okay, a couple of new things about this mostly painless upgrade to WP 2.0:

  • You can now edit your comments within thirty minutes of posting it. Give it a try; once your comment has been posted, you’ll see a little “e” link there, next to the date and time. Click that to enter editing mode.
  • I now have two anti-spam plugins working for me. By my reckoning, I’ve had about 17000 spam comments attack my blog over the time that it’s been up. That’s kind of scary, since there are only about 500 real comments.
  • Haha, I lied, there really is only the one new thing, the editing comments part.

The new interface is quite shiny, but alas! It takes a little longer to load on my memory-starved computer.

Classes so far this term, in emoticons:

Physical Chemistry: 😯
Organic Chemistry: :notsure:
French Grammar: :dorkygrin:
French Literature: :nosey:

And for those of you who prefer words….

Physical Chemistry: I never thought I’d see calculus again. First lecture and I’m already scared to death. There’s no way I’m not getting the ‘optional’ textbook. *sigh* Do Arts students ever have ‘optional’ texts?

Organic Chemistry: Haha, my prof last term had this prof when was an undergrad. I find that kinda of sad and rather amusing at the same time. I heard this guy’s class is really hard… which means I’ll just have to continue the two-hour study sessions with my friend. -_-;

French Grammar: I have Mike and Sam’s old prof! Yay! He seems like a nice enough guy, but I wish I still had my prof from last term…

French Literature: Ahhh, this prof is AWESOME! I’m not looking forward to the 1200 word essays, but I love his lecturing style. So dynamic! So… alive! So… cool!

I also bought the optional biochem text today. If I figure out I really don’t need it, I can always return it, right?

Oh, and lately I have rediscovered the joy of used bookstores (you find jewels there you can’t get anywhere else!) I traded in my extra Fugitive Pieces and some random book I had that I was never going to read for a French-Japanese dictionary (pity it doesn’t really go the other way; I could make more use of that) and fifty cents. With which I promptly bought E = mc2: The Biography of the Famous Equation. Fun stuff.

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6 Responses to “New Year, new WP, new term, new books”

Anthony Says:

Some anomalies about textbooks from today;

You know how text books are officially classified as “required” or “recommended” or “optional” (I’ve never seen any of these)?
So in my International Trade class today, the lecturer says, “I still use the sixth edition” (even though the bookstore sells the new 7th edition). SO, someone asks, do we need to buy the textbook? The lecturer says, “It’s a required textbook. You will do well on the exam if you only read the lecture notes and slides. But I recommend getting the textbook.”
Then she goes on to say the textbook would be useful if you don’t understand her accent or don’t want to come to class.
Sounds promising.

In my Economic History of Modern Europe class we have a required reading package, but all the articles are available on JSTOR or webct. So you only have to buy it if you want to pay for it.

January 5th, 2006 at 2:19 pm

Cat Says:

JSTOR?

I dunno, I sometimes buy course packs like that because I hate reading articles on the computer and I’d spend as much on ink printing them all out. Oh, and of course, I’m lazy too 😀

January 5th, 2006 at 6:00 pm

Cat Says:

Do my comments count work NOW?

//edit: Yes, yes they do. Poor Spam Karma 2. I TRUSTED you! I TRUSTED you!

January 5th, 2006 at 7:31 pm

Cat Says:

Now, we try it again with SK2 on…

January 5th, 2006 at 7:33 pm

Anthony Says:

JSTOR: online historical/archival database of scholarly journals in the humanities and sciences (and other disciplines).

You won’t believe how much money/time/paper I spend photocopying and printing course materials.

January 5th, 2006 at 11:27 pm

Bobby Says:

There’s usually an “optional” study guide for most Psych courses. Since I made the mistake of buying the study guid for Psych 100, I’ve steered clear of these useless packages of paper. The textbooks already offer exercises for study purposes and the questions in the study guides are mostly much easier than questions on tests.

January 5th, 2006 at 11:39 pm