A Little Off Code, Computers, Photography and Guns

School Has Started Again

I'm finally back in school with all of my friends and so far it's not been too stressful of a transition from full-on nothing to full-bore school. Well speaking from not much experience since today I only had work lol.

I was lucky enough to not have class on Mondays and Wednesdays for my particular schedule. Which leaves me pretty large chunks of time where I can actually get useful things done at work.

I'd have to say the only stressful thing I've had to deal with until this point was fixing my sleep schedule which during the summer had lapsed into some sort of nocturnal scheme. Though I managed to tackle that really and here's how:

First i did my research on sleep disorders and typical treatments for them, I even thought for a little bit there that I had a mild variety of DSPS^[1] which you can read about in decently good detail at the footnote link. One particular treatment i read about that sounded really promising and really easy was a melatonin supplement which can be had at just about any pharmacy without prescription. As it turns out this actually works really well, granted I still have trouble sleeping all the way through the night, it is much, much easier to go to sleep when I intend to.

The other thing Idid that helped greatly to reset my sleep schedule back to typical hours of operation was going camping with some friends the weekend before school started. Besides being great fun, being exposed only to natural light and having a more or less forced sleep//wake time helped loads. It is kind of amazing to go for a couple of years living entirely with artificial light after sundown straight to camping with nearly no artificial light at all. Turns out it only took me a grand total of 2 nights in the wilderness to reset my sleep schedule. I can now wake up at a decent hour in the morning and not feel sick, sleep deprived or robbed of my sanity.

This bodes well for my classes.

On a somewhat related note: the University of Arizona is absolutely packed this semester. According to president Shelton's email yesterday the freshman class is the largest it's been, ever, at a whopping 7000. The university is the academic home to 38,000 students total.

I'm still trying to wrap my mind around how ridiculous all this financial crap is. I was talking to my mother on google talk the other night^[2] and she was getting ready to pay my tuition online and asked "Uhh, why is your tuition $700 more than it was last semester?" to which I replied in a similar to but not exact wording "You see mom because of all the financial disasters the school is hurting for money so they're taking it from who they're used to taking it from, the students."

On an even more unrelated note: I hate paid online services associated with classes. If you've taken math at the University of Arizona in the last 2 years you'll know what I'm talking about. In just about any math class you have to fork out something like $15 to register for webassign^[3] which you'll do a portion or all of your homework on. In my english classes this summer I had to pay $35 for an online service^[4] that the professor ditched 2 weeks in anyway because of technical difficulties; never got a refund for that. Now all of the sudden my thermo//optics class is having us do homework online, $45 for that^[5]. It's like they're charging me just to do my homework.

1. Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome [↩]
2. Google talk happens to be the only instant messaging system//service my mom is aware of // can cope with, mostly because it's integrated with her email account at gmail. [↩]
3. http://www.webassign.net/ [↩]
4. http://www.mycomplab.com/ [↩]
5. http://www.masteringphysics.com/ [↩]