PHIDONG.COM . 5.0

After an entire year, I'm back pretty much where I started. The only reassuring thing I can tell myself is, "Only two more years of this and we're done. Two more years." This quarter is going to be hard and I'm not helping myself much by making it harder. I hate my schedule.

UCI decided it was best to cancel another one of my classes. This is the second time it has happened. The first time they canceled my Friday lab, which was annoying because I had my schedule set-up so that I only had to wake up early once. Then they decided it'd be hilarious to cancel my discussion on Friday morning too, so now my schedule is drastically different. I go to school at 10AM twice a week, but luckily for me one of the 10AM classes is a lab that only meets 4 times this quarter. I've already knocked one down, although I showed up 15 minutes late because I couldn't find the classroom inside the lab. But it's over and the only thing left for that is to do the report, which should be fun since it all has to be done on the computer.

The other class I have to wake up for is my Discussion on Monday mornings. I quite possibly picked the WORSE time to schedule a class, early Monday morning. 10AM isn't that early though, I guess I can thank my year of 8AM Physics for thinking 10AM isn't that bad (although with my sleep schedule the way it is now, I can't see it could be good...)

Some people are telling me that this is one of the hardest quarters as a Civil Engineer. The good news is that I'm not a Civil Engineering major. The bad news is that I'm taking many of the same courses, although they have it a little worse. They have to take Fluid Mechanics, Mechanics of Materials, and some Traffic class. I only have to take the first two, but only is an understatement because these aren't easy cheesy and our professors are not very strong lecturers.

Fluid Mechanics . As if the topic were not hard enough, our professor is asian with a pretty strong accent. It's understandble though, when he speaks loud enough for you to hear it and process it. The other 99% of the time he is just mumbling words to himself as he rewrites the textbook onto the white board. His overuse of phrases such as, "so simple", "very easy", etc. aren't too encouraging either, considering I have no idea how to even do the first problem on his homework set. Today I narrowly missed a quiz that I didn't prepare for when one of the girls in the class nervously said, "tails". The professor flipped a coin and caught it in his other hand, looked down and said "tails". The entire class begain cheering and applauding and by entire I mean everybody but me and some people around me. So we didn't have a quiz, but we're going to have one next week. You can count on that.

Mechanics of Materials . The fact that this class draws heavily on two courses which I barely passed doesn't really favor me. Not only does this mean that once the course began that I was already behind the rest of the students, but it means that this material, which is gauranteed to be more complex, complicated, and more involved than the courses which I "passed" (I got a D), is just going to be harder than before. To make matters worse, the professor of the course hasn't gone over a single problem yet. I sat through 20 minutes of his lecture on Monday thinking to myself, "When is he going to start lecturing??" At that point he was just talking about stress and tension and how they are related or something like that. After another 30 minutes of him talking informally to the class, I realized that this was his lecture. This was how he taught. After this epiphany, I also came to the conclusion that I'm going to need a LOT of help in this class. If I want to pass, that is.

E8 and ESS51 aren't going bad though, which is good news. ESS51 seems a bit more difficult than E8, but I haven't gone to enough class to give a fair evaluation of the course. I did get my book in on Tuesday, so I have two chapters to catch up on for E8 as well as 2-3 chapers for CEE150 and CEE170. E8 is really the only class I've read for. The book is somewhat intriguing, although I will admit that on the 250th page I lost patience and read the ending of the book. To be fair to me, the professor had already told us how the case ended, but I decided that I needed to see it for myself. Our mock trials are next month, which gives me plenty of time to prepare my bullshit brief. The bad news is that my group is and I have to do opening/closing even though I wanted to do geology. Oh well. They were like, "Who wants to do it " nobody was saying anything and someone had to man up, so I did. This will probably turn out to be one of the worst decisions I have made in my entire life.

A year ago, around this time, I was standing outside of Starbucks on the phone. Photovillage. Richard? picked up the phone and I gave him my credit card number and two days later (yes, I ordered 2nd day shipping) a 20D was sitting on my doorstep. This means two things:

1) I've notched another year on my photography experience and trust me, this year has taught me many things.

and 2) My warranty is about to expire.

So I'm going to bring my battery grip, which hasn't been fully fixed and my camera into the Service Center tomorrow and see if they can calibrate, adjust, etc. everything and make it all good again. I was hoping the shutter would go before my warranty is up, but I guess not.

In other news, the 50mm f/1.4 that I bought from FM came in again. Yeah, I got another one. I'm slowly buying all my lenses back because I miss them so much. Just kidding. So my lens line-up is now: Sigma 15mm f/2.8, Sigma 20mm f/1.8, Canon 50mm f/1.4, Canon 85mm f/1.8, Canon 135mm f/2L, Sigma 100-300mm f/4. A bunch of Canons sammiched together by Sigmas. I kind of miss my Tamron though and my only zoom feels lonely. Maybe I'll buy it back.

And yeah, I am becoming a Canon whore.

I'm going to get my 135L box from Loc soon!

Oh yeah and I guess I'm going to start shooting for the Yearbook when I get my camera back. I guess I'm retiring from camera collecting and actually picking up shooting. It should be interesting to see if I can improve at all. I guess this is a step forward.

I wonder what the 3 steps back are going to be...