Klout's Horribly-Formed Opinion of Me

Klout says that I'm:




DSLR? Camera? World of Warcraft? Not one of those apply. I bet you can guess how much I trust Klout scores.

Thanks, Amazon

Yesterday, Amazon told me that they had recommendations for me. Hoping they had found some more sources for my thesis, I clicked on the link. What came up?

The Truly Disadvantaged.

I wonder if I could at least order an electric toothbrush from Amazon? Mine died. :(

And, in case you were wondering, I have completed the first draft of THREE pages of my thesis! That means I will be done at approximately the start of September (Sundays don't count). With the first rough draft. Ack!

And I still don't have any internet access at home. Sometimes that's good without a distraction, but sometimes that's bad when I need to look up some info!

I Passed!

Just another reason why I love the internet: I'm going to make a little bit of money to make up for the lack of a job 1. this semester, and 2. in America.

Dear Michelle,

Thank you for completing the Training Simulator Test. We are pleased to inform you that you passed and have been accepted as a ChaCha Text (SMS) Guide. You can now receive real queries!

Now start texting more queries to ChaCha! (242242)

Okay, update: man! This is interesting but sometimes tedious and impossible work, hardly worth the pay. Maybe I should care less about the quality of the question. You try finding out which gym from Jasper won the All-American United Cheer in 2007. Impossible! I got 15 cents for about ten minutes. I guess my $6 so far is better than nothing . . .

Office Episodes Pulled?

I'm upset! I fly all the way to America to watch full online episodes of The Office, and all but four episodes are taken offline a few days before I can catch up with the season. What is this?!?

This is Why I Don't Date Online

hey, nice profile. i love it. i would love to be get in contct with you. first i want to be build a good friendship and than we will see where the way goes. distance doesen't matter for me at the frist time. my messanger is not working right now, but i hope to get fixed it..:-) i know what i am andi don't care about the model-stuff and everything else. a friend doesn't have to look like a model. the attitude is more important. bye for now wolff

Not to mention that he describes himself as "very borring, sad, stupied, mad" and he is 36. (Name changed to protect the . . . man.)

Pre-Written Essays

In looking for supporting documents for one of my essays, Google brought me to several websites where you can buy pre-written papers. I wasn't interested in buying, especially not to turn in something I didn't write; but I did want to see if they had good ideas or good sources I could also look at. Unfortunately, the view is restricted (thank goodness I have experience with EBSCOHost). But I just wanted to tell you, did you know they have live, 24-hour support on those sites? Man, they must be making bank to support that kind of customer service. It made me wonder which site a suspicious paper I had to grade came from, if indeed it wasn't written by my student. Is it really worth it, people, to pay instead of getting to do interesting research, slaving away your time, and learning? I don't think so.

Libraries, Books, and Google

This is an interesting dilemma. I'm all for digitizing books (for digitizing everything, really), and I learned a lot about Google's project while I was researching Google this last year. However, I have to wonder if the libraries that are resisting having their books digitized are really doing it because they don't want the availability of information to be business-related. It seems to me that although librarians are huge fans of freedom of speech, when it really comes down to it, if all books are digitized, there is no need for libraries and thus no need for librarians.

Maybe while libraries try to make up their minds, Google should turn to what I've been waiting for: if anyone has the computing power to link the world's genealogy, it's Google. They could call it Googlealogy or something cutesy like that.

People like my friend Sister Seipert write hundreds of letters searching for names and dates of another generation of ancestors. Luckily, she got an answer this week and learned of a new couple in her family tree. Congrats!

Online Translation

You've gotta love online translation! It's almost like Engrish.com. Guck mal:

Hello me yard!

Mia zywietz has leave behind a new message on your pi wall! To read around it you can log on here and can click then on "my side" :

http://www.studivz.net

Much joke! Your Studiverzeichnis team

Driving on the Right Side

Two and a half weeks in England rubbed off on me more than I thought it did. While I was there, I tried so hard to remember which way to look first when crossing the street. Even after I got it down, I had this deeply-instilled feeling that I should also look the other way, just in case. Sometimes I'd end up crossing the street looking back and forth four or five times. Ha ha.

Now that I'm here, I'm so confused! I keep looking to the right first. I'll get it eventually.

I often wonder if there will be a world correlation department some day. It's a bit of a tragedy, but with the internet connecting people, the world is getting smaller and cultural differences are disappearing. It wouldn't surprise me if signs all began to look alike. That'd actually be quite helpful for tourists. The idea of me driving here is scary. However, with my bank account the way it is, that's most likely not going to happen unless a friend with a car has an emergency . . .

Craig's List

So I posted my laptop on Craig's List. I've gotten a lot of emails about it, but they all seem to be scams. I've gotten these sob stories about a kid whose mom died and a kid who is in the hospital and how they'll send extra money so I can ship it. Isn't the whole point of Craig's List to sell to a local buyer so you won't have to deal with shipping?

I have replied to these requests, letting the potential buyers know that I'd rather deal locally. One woman responded, "But I said I would send you an extra $100 for shipping." I wanted to respond, "I don't really feel like dealing with all the money issues, figuring out packaging, and walking two or three miles to the post office and back. Unless you're going to send enough extra for me to take a taxi, sorry!"

When Are You Leaving?

So, everyone wants a date.
"When will you be leaving again? Oh, you still haven't decided?"
are questions I hear several times per day. You'd think everyone wanted me to hurry and go or something. :)

I told my mom this morning that it's kind of hard to figure things out with our dial-up internet. I can't even imagine what it used to be like without the internet. She kindly dropped me off at the library, with the goal in mind of figuring out a date. I used up all my allotted time on the library's computers before I reported that the wireless wasn't working. They rebooted and now I'm on my own laptop.

Here's what I have so far:
-Leipzig does not offer a German program in September. Only August. So that would mean I'd leave August 3rd or so.
-Do I really need to take a German program? Or should I just go with what I have and grow from there on my own? This option would mean I wouldn't need to be there until the first week of October.
-There is a really cute, little city named Konstanz that offers a German program during September. It is a really good deal, and the city is beautiful. It is between two bodies of Swiss-blue water and on the border of Switzerland and Germany. The program is meant for students of the university there, so I'm waiting for a reply to my email about making an exception for me. This option would mean I leave the first week of September.

So there you go. I'm either leaving the first week of August, the first week of September, or the first week of October. I hope you're a bit more satisfied.

Here is the Google Earth image of Konstanz (Constance). Isn't it beautiful? That yellow line is the border of Germany and Switzerland. Konstanz is directly above the V-shaped part of the border.

As I told Scott's roommate Dan as we talked about Swiss pride last night, "People think I'm brave moving to Germany. I'm really moving there because I don't have the guts to move where I really want to be: Switzerland."