For the past week, U of M's campus newspaper the Michigan Daily has had several stories about an offensive Facebook group started by MSA President Zack Yost. In today's letters to the editor several students expressed shock and dismay at both the MSA reps for being such tools, and the Daily for sensationalizing the story.

All right kiddies, gather around. I've been here for six years now, and apparently it's time I explained something to all of you. Many things change at U of M over the years, but there are some immutable constants upon which the university's community is founded:

1. The MSA is an ineffectual group of blowhards that waste countless reams of paper every so often to get elected to a governmental body that has no real power and does nothing more than meet every week to feel important, boost each other's egos, and boost up their resumes.
2. The Michigan Daily is a joke of a newspaper. It is good for three things and three things only: laughing at the constant plagiarism and poor editing, laughing at the ridiculous crime reports, and doing the crossword/sudoku during class. If you want to read real news, go get a real newspaper. Or, if you're not living in 1990, go look on the internet.

The fact that the president of MSA has turned out to be a total jackass shouldn't come as a surprise to anybody. The fact that the Daily is blowing the whole thing totally out of proportion to try and fill their pages with something approaching actual news also should not come as a surprise to anybody. You kids aren't nearly cynical enough to be college students.

I'm currently sitting in the Media Union trying to do some work. Just a few minutes ago, some idiot tried walking through the emergency fire exit doors. I happen to be sitting directly below the alarm. He is not my favorite person in the world right now.

College of Engineering students*, I have a message for you. If you walk up to a door, and it has a big sign that says "DOOR ALARMED. EMERGENCY EXIT ONLY.", don't walk through it! It really, really makes me sad that someday this guy is going to be building systems that will probably destroy lives.

Now, I know, we all make mistakes. However, I'd like to think that an engineering student at a top engineering school has learned to master the art of paying attention to big fucking signs on doors. It's really not that hard.

* I'm only assuming he's an engineering student. On this part of north campus, the only options are going to be engineer, art student, or music student. He wasn't carrying one of those huge portfolios, so that rules out art. There aren't any practice rooms in the building, so that rules out music. Plus, he was disheveled, his hygiene wasn't great, and he was Asian. That pretty much screams engineer.

Well, time to start another semester. I'm hoping this one will be less hectic than last semester was. In retrospect, I think I bit off a bit more than I could chew. I'm taking one less class this semester, and I don't have any early classes, so hopefully things will be a bit more manageable.

That's all, just wanted to give a quick update before the semester starts. I'm sure I'll have more to say later.

P.S. bonus points if you can identify where I got the quote that titles this post.

So Michigan's email system is down. Again. This has been happening at least once a day for the past few months. When I try to refresh my inbox, I get this message:

Which can be roughly translated to:

I hate you too, ITCS.

I'm currently sitting in the library working on my last programming project for the semester. Just now I happened to glance at the monitor of the guy sitting behind me. He's playing Warcraft 3. In the library. During the last week of classes.

I think he's just doing it to rub it in all of our faces that he can. The bastard.

A quick update from the front lines:

Well, this semester has turned out to be stress city. I bit off more than I could chew this semester, and unfortunately didn't figure that out before the drop/add deadline. I've got projects due and exams coming up in the next two weeks for two out of three of my classes, and since they're both early classes I slept through my alarm a few (okay, many) times, so I have to do some major time studying to catch up. In my third class I have two major projects due in the next two weeks, one of which is the project from hell: it's worth 50% of my grade, we were supposed to have started a month ago, and I have basically nothing done.

Hurray!

(tears hair out and runs away crying)

I'm thinking about making a sign. A big sign, that says in big block letters:

If these damn kids sitting across from me don't stop making out, I'm going to have to splash them with cold water or something. I mean come on, they're in the middle of the freaking media union!

I think What I really need is a cane, so I can swing it at them and yell "Damn kids!"

Well, it's been a while, so I thought I'd put something here. It's been a great summer working for S3, and I've still got about a month to go. Today was the company picnic, which was OK. Free food and free beer are always a plus.

I start grad school in a little over a month, and I still haven't registered for classes. I should probably get on that. I've been avoiding thinking about school until August, so I guess I can put that off for a few more days. I should also probably start thinking about the research job I've got lined up.

I've been working a lot with Ruby on Rails this summer, and I've gotten a lot of good ideas for ways to redesign the backend of the site to be more maintainable and easier to change, so I may implement some of those in the future. I think first I need to get around installing a proper linux distro onto a virtual machine on my laptop, so I can actually test the php code real-time.

Anyways, Venture Bros. is finishing up, so that's probably enough for now.

I was reading a column on the opinions page of the Michigan Daily today, when I came across a great article supporting affirmative action. Specifically:

"I do not believe [affirmative action] to be a permanent solution. I believe it is only a temporary fix to an extremely complex problem."

Finally somebody gets it! I've been saying the same thing for three years! If more pro-affirmative action people were this reasonable and logical, I might even be persuaded to agree with them!

Well, my path for the next 1.5 years has been set. This summer I'm going back to Amazon as an intern in the Web Services group. Web Services is a big part of the "Web 2.0" movement, and is a fairly exciting area in the world of web programming these days. Definitely exciting stuff.

Also, although it's not officially official, I've been accepted to the U of M CSE Master's program, so I'm happy about that. It's only a three semester program, which I think is a happy medium between getting in more good classes and not being in school too much longer. Like I said, I'm waiting on the official notification from the School of Graduate Studies, but my department accepted me, so as I understand it it's essentially a done deal.