Life Inside

..Grad school. (This is very tongue in cheek from this article)

How to behave around grad students

Be respectful to other grad students: Striding into the yard like you own the place will earn you enemies, and -- in a place where you have to keep your enemies closer than your friends -- this could prove fatal. Stripped to your bare soul, the only three valuable assets you’ll have left are respect, dignity and pride.

Don’t stare at a fellow grad student: The wrong look inside a grad school will either mean you’re their new worst enemy or new best friend. And you’d better believe that being their new worst enemy is better than being the type of new best friend he’d force you to become.

Don’t become a target: If a confrontation does arise -- and, let’s face it, it probably will -- strike first. You must guard your reputation with your life, and giving in to the first confrontational situation will only make you a target for future attacks.

Don’t be a snitch: If you see anything illegal going on -- such as the trading of drugs or another inmate getting hoe checked (beaten by a group) -- walk away. The moment you snitch is the moment you become public enemy number one. While you may have earned brownie points with the facultys, you’ll pay for it in beatings later.

Assess who you can trust: Don’t give in to the temptation to jump at the first offer of protection. Instead, wait a few days, get a sense of the lay of the land, and establish who you can (kind of) trust.

Take nothing on credit: This includes drugs, food, toiletry items or dirty magazines. Being a debtor to someone in grad school immediately makes you theirs -- in fact, you might as well put a dog collar around your neck and inscribe it with the word “bitch.” Grad school is a game of power -- don’t give yours away.

Avoid becoming a fellow inmate’s “girlfriend”: While being someone’s “girlfriend” will afford you protection from fellow inmates, this protection is fickle; inmates’ “girlfriends” are often traded, sometimes for something as superficial as a pack of cigarettes.

Your first day

Entering grad school is not like your first day at school -- it’s worse. You’ll be taken off the grad school bus and led inside. The noise will be tremendous and grad students will be sizing you up, jeering at you and doing everything they can to intimidate you. Don’t let them see weakness; keep your eyes firmly ahead of you and walk confidently inside, but don’t swagger. You’ll have your photograph taken, you'll be asked a couple of questions. Accept your staple supplies -- including your uniform and pillow -- and follow the faculty to your office.

Passing the time

Your time in grad school is marked by seconds, minutes, hours, days, months, and years for the worst criminal offenders. Because there’s so much of this thing we call “time” in grad school, it would be foolish to waste it. In grad school, you don’t need to worry about the daily pressures of the outside world. Therefore, you should spend every minute of every day inside developing yourself as a human being.

Remember: While you may want to pass the time you spend inside as quickly as possible, it is still time out of your life and you wouldn’t want to throw that away, would you? Make a habit of waking up early and spending the day doing any jobs you are assigned, studying one of the courses available and reading as much as you can. As well as keeping yourself busy, you’ll beat the system -- even though you’re behind bars, they can’t imgrad school your mind. So many grad students waste the day by watching television and sleeping. They learn nothing whilst inside, and emerge into the real world as inadequate human beings as they were when they went in.

Preserving your mental health

All around you there’ll be grad students with mental health problems. The likelihood is that your fellow students won’t make life easy for you. Similarly, some faculty won’t be as professional as they should be and will make your stay as uncomfortable as possible; they will taunt and bully you to see if they can make you crack. It’s little wonder why some grad students are put on suicide watch; after days of being told they’re useless, they come to believe it.

Believe in yourself: Many of the negative thinkers inside will have you doubting yourself, but you shouldn’t. Explain to yourself that you’re not worthless, that you can’t change the past, that you’re paying the price, and that you plan to change your wayward ways. Spend some time thinking about the good person you want to become and want to be perceived as by others. Exert positive thinking over those niggling doubts and you’re halfway there.

Try not to worry about anything you can’t control: What will be, will be. The woman waiting for you on the outside will either be faithful or she’ll jump into the sack with your best friend; your children will either be forgiving or tell their mother that they never want to see you again and mean it; and your pending appeal will either be successful or thrown out of court, while the judges and lawyers are falling over with laughter. Instead of wasting mental energy on issues like these, place focus on positive thinking.

Keep up prayer and meditation: Just because you’ve wound up in jail, it doesn’t mean the big man upstairs won’t listen to you anymore. In fact, now is the time to be repentant and gain that spiritual peace of mind that you’ve been searching for.

Preserving your physical health

Grad schools aren’t known to be the most wholesome of places, so it’s up to you to ensure that you keep yourself in tip-top condition. With so much spare time on your hands, you can make sure you walk out like Wentworth Miller in Grad school Break -- pumped, strong and ready to take on that big, bad world.

Look after your personal hygiene: Shower as often as you can, brush your teeth twice a day, shave, and comb your hair. As well as making yourself feel good, it will project a powerful message about you to others: You may be down, but you’re certainly not out.

Make sure your living quarters are clean: While you can’t help it if a rat crawls through the iron bars and into your bed, you can do something about it and alert a faculty.

Give up your vices: Throw away the cigarettes, say no to booze and pass on the grass. Keep your mind clear and make sure that you break any habits beforehand if you know you’re due to start a sentence (not only will habits get you in trouble with faculty, but they’ll show a sign of weakness to fellow students and they’ll prey on them).

Keep eating habits to a minimum inside grad school: Grad school food is generally fatty, and contains little to no nutritional value. Drink plenty of water and eat fruit whenever it’s available.

Release date

If your release date is coming up, don’t tell anyone. Some inmates take pleasure in stumping the release of other inmates by getting them in trouble. Don’t even tell the students you think you’ve become friends with. Remember: Nobody is your friend inside grad school. More to the point, don’t say any emotional goodbyes to anyone -- you certainly don’t want to maintain friendships with them on the outside and have them turning up on your doorstep when they’re released. You’ll need to surround yourself with positive influences if you’re determined not to get locked up again.

the lockdown

There is no life inside grad school -- just survival. If you can survive your jail sentence without your face being a permanent shade of black and blue, involuntarily embarking on a relationship with a fellow inmate in the shower and being put in solitary confinement for a fight you didn’t start, you’re doing well. Grad school isn’t glamorous -- it’s mean, nasty and you sure as hell don’t want to run someone over on purpose just to get a taste of life inside. But if you do end up in the slammer, remember that jail has its very own subculture -- one that you must become a part of as soon as possible if you’re to emerge smiling.

Death and Taxes

Only two things constant in this world. Here's a amusing summary of the taxes on a AT&T $40 bill. (From ./ comment)

According to the 4th ed. FC&C Salesmaster's Manual, the taxes on a $40 calling plan is 2d10+2 percent for all classes and alignments of customer.

However, the rules get tricky when adding the data and text plans. If you add those and the customer is any Lawful alignment, or your class is Apple Cultist, the monthly fees and taxes are a d20+30 per month.

If you're Neutral, sales should charge 2d10+2 percent of the total purchase in fees, plus a flat setup fee of 3d20, and whatever the local tax rate is (see Table 13-4.7, "Telecommunication Tax Rates of Municipalities, Provinces, Kingdoms, Shires and Deities").

If your alignment is Chaotic, or you have the Late Bills or Frequent Support Caller flaws, or your class is Go Phoner, your fees are (3d20)d20+(d20)d6, plus (2d20)d20 percent taxes, plus 2d6 in franchise fees, plus 3d20+d6 setup.

If you're identified as Chaotic Hard-to-Please alignment, the Salesmaster may simply escalate fees and taxes and make up complex usage rules (2Gb bandwidth cap except on Fridays and the alternating days of the third week of every fourth month, when it's 256k, for example) until the customer gives up.

However, if sales can't determine your alignment or class - if you're a new customer, for example, or your billing and prior plan history isn't available -Âthey will probably refuse to answer your questions. If a customer immediately submits, they get Apple Cultist treatment. If a customer questions the refusal but eventually submits, they get Chaotic treatment.

If a customer is an insistent questioner, the Salesmaster considers the player in combat and gives the player d6-2 rounds to flee before calling security (see U.S. Government's "Monster and Enforcement Officer Bestiary," table 2.1-1, "Rented Muscle").

Phones

What is it about cell phones? All of their ring tones are annoying. Further, pretty much every day around 5pm all the cell phones in the office go off, and much loud conversation ensues. Basically its, in chinese "when are you coming home". Jesus people, give your spouse a break and quit calling every f-ing day.

RIP Michael DeBakey

Dr. Michael DeBakey passed away this week, he was 99. This guy is truely a hero of medical science, so many things he has done, too many to list. The preeminence of the Texas Medical Center as one of the world's best medical centers is due hugely to his efforts. We will all miss him. The flags have flown at half-mast for this week, as befits his stature.

New Iraq Blog

Armed and curious What's really interesting is to read his posts starting from April, noted the rocket fire from Sadr City, to the recapturing of Sadr City two months ago, to walking around a peaceful Sadr City currently.

I think this is the sound of victory, and while things could change, it seems that Iraq is on a irrevocable, tangible path of victory. Thus it no longer matters who's President of the U.S. come January, by then (god willing) the hot war will be over.

Really insipiring stuff.

Your daily dose of ER horror stories

here

10 reasons Vista sucks

Or ten reasons its supposedly better than XP, exposed.


1. It's more secure than Windows XP. After being implicitly responsible for botnets and security breaches through the incredible popularity of their Windows XP, Microsoft went back and made sure Vista is more secure than its predecessor. And it is. According to security firm PC Tools, Vista had 639 unique threats over a six-month period, whereas XP had 1021. This came from much internal restructuring under the hood, but there's a chance that it might be due to Vista being a smaller target than XP for malware as well.


So the data are based on the number of unique threats? Maybe that's due to Vista being a smaller install base? Like 10 fold smaller? Actually if you look at it as unique threats per install-base, then Vista is far less secure. But we wouldn't say that, because that would be stupid.



2. It's the best looking Windows yet. Despite any complaints users may have about Aero hogging up too many CPU cycles or requiring a video card from this millennium to use, it's still the best looking Windows yet. I mean really, do you remember what XP looked like out of the box? With that gigantic balloon of a task bar and the green Start button. Vista's glass definitely trumps that. And then there's the underlying graphical framework changes which allow new features like live thumbnails. All these visual effects may require more power, but you can't deny that it's pleasing to look at.

Does anyone really care about how pretty a OS looks out of the box? OSes should be flexible enough that they can look like whatever the user wants, like Linux GNOME or KDU for example. I certainly don't care, it has to be functional, and the authors even admit the resources required for this prettiness is way beyond XP's requirement.

3. Games work just about as well as under XP. There's a slight performance degradation under Vista when compared to Windows XP using the exact same hardware. Is it noticeable? Probably, but it's somewhere around the level of 10%. There's also the consideration of DirectX 10 and the visual improvements you'll get in the future when more developers really take advantage of it. With a slightly better video card, you won't even really notice that you're going at 90FPS versus 100FPS.

What modern game is running at 100 fps on Vista? That's right, zero. I mean if you want to play WoW, which is, what, 4 years old, you can get 100fps, at that point the performance hit doesn't matter. The DX10 is a marketing scam as far as I can tell. MS is requiring people to run vista in order to play a game with DX10. But nowadays most games run DX9 and DX10, or only DX9. I'd rather have 10% of my performance back, since most games will be pushing the OS for all its worth. Even with killer rigs, modern games with maxed out settings will struggle to hit 30 fps. We need performance more than fancy tricks.


4. Vista Media Center is a fantastic DVR. Microsoft integrates their fantastic Windows Media Center Edition into Home Premium and Ultimate, and it's pretty much the best DVR you can get outside of getting a TiVo. Combine it with various Media Center Extenders, of which there are lots (such as the Xbox 360), you can get HDTV streamed to anywhere in your house from one computer in your office. Our only complaint is still that Cable Labs doesn't allow you to stick a CableCARD tuner onto just any appropriately spec'd Vista PC—you actually have to buy a machine pre-made for CableCARD.

Tivo is also a fantastic DVR. If you had a full Vista powered PC hooked up to your TV, that's fine. But 99.9% of us don't, its stupid and there is no need, not when tiny Linux powered TIVO is there to do the same thing but with 90% less horsepower/cost requirement. Why would you shell out $1000 for a glorified TIVO? I wouldn't.


5. The sleep mode works. Sleep mode in Windows XP was essentially a shortcut for locking up your computer and forcing you to reboot. It actually does what it's supposed to in Vista.

Admittedly, that's nice. But best sleep mode? The off button. Actually better - remove the plug, since there is still residual power even when off. But yeah, this would be a nice cost saver if it worked.

6. Built-in search is better and more useful. Vista's searching feature relies on cataloging your hard drive, then searching the resulting database to quickly (and easily) find your files. By default it's just limited to a couple user folders, but if you expand it to your entire hard drive, you'll be able to find anything fast, much like the way Spotlight works on a Mac. The downside is that during the first day or two, everything slows down while Vista indexes your computer. Best to leave it on overnight or over a weekend while you're away.

From what i've seen, this causes your HD to run at 100% all day every day. Probably a great way to ruin HDs. But yeah it is an admittedly useful thing. However, google already has google desktop, which does the same thing, on any OS, and it's free, and probably faster.

7. User Account Control is useful for some people. I have to admit that I've turned this off but UAC—the thing that pops up and asks you for your password whenever you do something on the system level—is useful in theory for many people, especially those who share a family computer. Hide the administrator password from your parents/grandparents/kids so they won't be able to install any weird apps they're not supposed to. In practice, it's a bit annoying in that it pops up for mundane things that shouldn't really need system-level clearance. It's a step in the right direction; however, if you want to disable UAC for certain programs, see here.

I have this same issue with Ubuntu. It's extremely annoying to get password prompts for doing things like writing CDs, changing the time, etc. If i could figure out how to turn it off, i would. And really, the physical security threat isn't an issue for almost all users. Its the stuff downloaded from the Internet, which UAC won't do anything to prevent.

8. Drivers support isn't as bad as it's made out to be. Although "Man gets Windows Vista to work with printer" may be an actual non-Onion headline, the root cause of his original woes was that the man installed a Windows XP printer driver instead of the correct Vista one. But there is a smaller percentage of users who—no matter how old or new their peripheral is—can't get it to work with Windows Vista. The blame for this lies on peripheral manufacturers who either can't or won't update their drivers to support the new OS. There's not much you or Microsoft can do here, but it's rarer than you'd think from reading the internet.

Maybe the manufacturer's know a POS OS when they see one? But its a cart and horse problem. I won't upgrade until i know all my perepherals can work on the new OS, while mfrs won't write drivers for OS's with small user bases. However, the OS should be good enough to have a layered driver mode that accepts legacy drivers. Otherwise you are killing off perepherals that haven't been manufacturered in the last few years.


9. It's not any buggier than Windows XP. This is a bit of a corollary to #1, but out of the many, many Vista users we've seen, they almost all agree that the only times Vista has crashed or blue-screened on them was when they were doing something they usually don't do. The OS by itself rarely crashes in everyday use, and compared to even OS X Leopard, it's pretty damn sturdy. In a year's worth of daily use, we think the OS has probably only crashed once, if that.

XP with SP2 is remarkably bug free, it doesn't crash during my normal use. And this is the 64 bit poorly supported version. So, my OS isn't buggy, why should i upgrade?

10. Vista is not slow if you have enough RAM. One of the main complaints that users have is that Vista is slow, but they either upgraded Vista from an old machine or they purchased a "Vista Ready" system with only 512MB to 1GB worth of RAM. You can run Vista with 1GB of RAM, but like OS X, you really want to have at least 2GB. Modern operating systems get fatter because they DO more stuff for you under the hood, such as optimizing your memory for the applications you run often so they load faster.

Translation: Vista requires a new CPU/MB/vid card, and much more memory than XP. When you have to throw over two gigs of memory in there, something is wrong. XP takes up about 300 MB of memory (plus the giant cache it uses). So basically with Vista not only do you have to shell out for the new OS (which is very expensive for an OS), but you have to shell out for new memory (like every other windows upgrade out there). No thanks.

You can take my XP when you pry it from my cold lifeless fingers. Or i'll just upgrade to Linux which is finally becoming stable and user friendly.

We're not saying that Vista doesn't have its faults or that Windows 7 won't be better, we're saying that Vista is just not as bad as people are making it out to be. If you're on XP and you're afraid to upgrade, don't be. It's no worse than Windows XP if you pay attention to the stuff I mentioned above. As long as you've got a reasonably decent machine—and if you're reading Giz it's likely that you do—you're pretty safe in upgrading.

So it's no worse than XP, except the huge resource requirements. So if you have nothing else to do but throw money at a stupid OS and invite all sorts of upgrade nightmares, go ahead and get Vista.