Discovering the skies (A.K.A Why flying can be a real pain - Part 1)

I haven't been precisely a frequent flyer throughout my life. This tends to lead to a lack of memory of how crazy and exhausting flying is. It is almost like a suppressed memory. You have some notion of what is going to happen, but your brain insists on protecting you from the full-blown memory of it all.


However, I have flown enough during the past year to come to expect a few things that are almost certain to happen:


1. Your flight will most always be delayed. Those carefully planned connections WILL become a nightmare. 


It starts off good. You get to the first airport early, and calmly wait for your plane. You double check your boarding passes...yes, several hours between flights. That should be more than enough time to get something to eat, find the appropriate terminal, get through TSA, and  get to your gate before boarding time.

You're relaxed, in peace with the world, and then....

And, of course, because Murphy is never wrong, when you get to the next airport

Two hours later, when you finally get to the immigration guy, you're already exhausted and ready to confess whatever

Of course, the one time you'd love your flight to be delayed, it is right on time...








2. Playing tag with your gates


If once in a while you're lucky (?) enough to get to your next airport with enough time to get to  your next flight, airlines know waiting for flights can be quite tedious. Well, this simply will not do; and since airlines care so much about the happiness of their customers, they have designed a gigantic version of tag for you to entertain yourself.

At which point, you are once again left with just one option:

Author's unrelated note: This blog post started out small and suddenly took a life of its own. I think part of the fun of reading blogs is getting fun small notes that you can entertain yourself for a while, not getting a whole essay thrown in your face. Thus, I decided to split it into several parts, for everyone's entertainment (and my own sanity!)







(Part 2 - Is now up! Click here to read :) )

The Grad School Diares has now become: In Real Life

I realize it might not be a smart move to change the name of a blog before people even know about it. Or maybe it's actually much better to change it before. Either way, I thought it was time for a name change.

My original purpose was to blog from my experience with grad school, but it quickly went beyond that, and I think once I'm done with grad school that name would become obsolete, anyways. I like to think that I will still be blogging in a few years :)

So I have decided to change the name to In Real Life or IRL. Not only because I like the idea of it having an acronym, but also because IRL was also how I named a series of comics I drew a few years back, that I might want to resurrect with the magic of MS Paint to share with the world, taken from the distinction that was often made in conversations in online games (yeah...I'm that much of a nerd. But if you've read some of my posts you probably know that already). It's a name that I quite like, and that brings back a of fun memories, so I'm going to stick with it.

Nothing else will change. The posts will still be similar (my brain can only be so creative :P). The only thing that changed is the name, and the URL: www.InRealLifeBlog.blogspot.com

I wanted a more straightforward name...like IRL.blogspot.com, or InRealLife.blogspot.com...but those were taken. By people who haven't posted in YEARS!

So if you're one of those people, and would be ever-so-kind to give up the name, I would love you forever and ever!!

iCloud (yes THAT wonderful iCloud)

If you're reading this you'll probably get the impression that I hate Apple. Which is nothing new, really, as several people I know seem to think I do. The truth is, however, that I do not hate Apple. I'm just completely unimpressed by most their products. I don't think they're that special, they're just kind of idiot-proofed, but their features can be found in many other competitors, usually for a better price (particularly when it comes to software  and computers). I also dislike the fact that after buying something so expensive, the only way to upgrade to the better product is to buy a new one (for an exorbitant price), and that this happens only within a few months of the initial launch. The user barely has any time to enjoy their pretty new Apple device before feeling like they own something sadly outdated. The Oatmeal has managed to capture perfectly this situation here.

But the one thing that annoys me the most are the blinded Apple users who would set themselves on fire before admitting that Apple is not the most awesome and most advanced hardware/software/whatever that exists on this planet.  The latest of this events has been the announcement of the iCloud. While I don't pretend to be the foremost expert all Cloud platforms available (I've barely been mildly curious, at best) this is my take on how it happened:

 

So yeah...at least this time they're giving it away for free. Which, I must admit, is a nice change from the Apple policy. Or it might just be a trap, to get more people to switch to being Apple users D8





P.S. I know I got the Windows logo colors in the wrong order in the first few pics, but it was too late to fix it. Sorry about that.
 

Soup...soup....soup......crap, it's still there

I'm going to start this one off with a confession: I hate homemade soup. I freaking hate homemade soup. I can stand creams and chowders, and a few of the canned/packaged noodle soups. Heck, give me any sort of ramen (even the 25 cent one) and I'll down it happily! But just the thought of a "nice", healthy, full of condiments and stuff whose name I can't remember, 4-hour-slow cooking-broth homemade soup makes me want to gag.

Thing is, I have no problem with eating greens and vegetables. Take them out of the soup, I'll eat them happily. Except cilantro. (That thing tastes like dug up pet corpses mixed with muddy grass. Well, I've never eaten dug up pet corpses, but I'm sure that if somebody cut their grass in a rainy day and then decided to mix an old hamster buried in the yard with the muddy grass residues, that's what it would taste like; but I'm getting off track here...) Anyways, what I really can't stand is the broth. I hate it. Over the years I've tried everything to try to make it taste better:

Adding rice to it (helps mask the flavor, but doesn't take it away)

Potato chips

Real potatoes

You name it, I've tried it. Nothing helps.

As I've grown up, I've gotten better at eating them. Not because I like them. Definitely not because I've gotten used to them. It's because my brain got used to "behaving like an adult to give the kids a good example" so now instead of this:

When I'm invited somewhere and given soup, I eat it...reluctantly.

Soup was a particular nightmare as a kid. There's a particular, traditional soup where I come from, called "Olla de Carne". That translates into Pot of Meat. Talk about misleading advertisement!!! It's a LOT of broth with dozens of different vegetables inside of it, and a bit of meat. The meat pieces cook in the broth for so long they TASTE like the broth. It's completely disgusting (though most people seem to love it). My mom likes it so much, she would make it a lot when I was growing up. And that was HORRIBLE for me.

It was a nightmare for my little brother as well. Now, my younger brother was a much more normal child. He hated vegetables. Loathed them.So, while he loved the broth and meat, a soup so full of vegetables could only come out of the darkest nightmares for him.

My brother and I have very different personalities, but one crucial thing in common: We're both frustratingly stubborn and don't mind challenging authority if we think the battle is worth it. When it came to that soup, it was definitely worth it.

My mom couldn't stay there forever, so she left us there and came to check every couple of minutes. We were determined not to move. Who cares about the sunny day outside, this was a battle of principles. One we were not going to lose.

Now, that could have lasted forever, except for one fact. We were stubborn little kids, yes, but we were not stupid. In fact, quite the opposite. We were strategically-smart little brats. So it didn't take us too long to figure out that what each other hated was exactly what the other one loved. And so: operation "fool mom" was in order.

This was a winning strategy. Absolute genius. I don't even recall if my mom ever found out what we were doing. We thought we had this beat. Soup was no longer the ruler of our meal nightmares! We had looked into the soul of horror itself and survived. We had conquered: SOUP.

This happiness would have lasted forever and ever and ever. Until a new nightmare we could not have foreseen invaded our kitchen:

To this day, I cringe at the sight of fish heads.

P.S. Mom, if you're reading this, I do have to say I am not sorry...it was a matter of survival. I AM sorry that I  can't seem to draw you properly. Don't worry, you look nothing like that. For starters, you're tri-dimensional and with a nose. I'd say that makes a lot of difference.

This is what I think about when people talk about Kappas

I don't know how many of you have had to sit through statistics lectures. If you've been lucky enough to avoid them they go like this:

I have had to sit through many, many statistics lectures. Hours and hours of my life wasted in complete boredom (and fighting the inevitable sleep). And by being tortured like that I have learned one thing:


Statistics people like their greek letters. A LOT.

I have a feeling that the beginnings of this must have been something like

...or maybe not. But I like to think it was. 

So through all those lectures, I thought I heard it all. Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Rho....and then, a new one: KAPPA.

Now, if you're not half as a Japan Nerd as I am (or if you weren't addicted to Harvest Moon as a kid), then Kappa is just another one of those letters. For me, it's a completely different thing. This is what I think about when people talk about Kappas:

So when my statistics proffesor kept going on and on about a Kappa distribution, I really couldn't help myself

Needless to say, it was one of the most entertaining classes ever. Statistics would become so much cooler if river monsters were involved.

My PC doesn't like to be cheated on

I've always been a big supporter of PCs. At first, because all the stuff I played wouldn't run on Macs, so that made Macs suck so much it wasn't even questionable. Later, it became a thing of convenience. Sure, Macs are pretty. But I can't customize my Mac with the things I want. Sure, they're shiny, but the OSx version of the programs I use still sucks, and I don't feel like learning a whole new way of doing things for the sake of pretty-ness.

The prettyness is pretty hard to resist, of course, but the price has helped keep my temptations in place. However, when my new boss just handed over a MacBook to me since he wanted me to work on a Mac,  all my excuses went down the drain. It was just too pretty.

 So of course I took the shiny new computer home. I was mind boggled when I discovered you could make it talk back to you, even tell you a joke!!

But there was one thing that was not happy about this. Oh no, not happy at all.

Olivia is my computer. And she doesn't like being cheated on. Olivia did not appreciate Mac's presence in the apartment. In particular, when Mac was getting much more attention than her.

Well, Olivia is not just any pushover clingy gal. Oh no, Olivia has quite a personality. So Olivia decided to teach me a lesson: she stopped working. She would not load, she would not start, she would not do anything. She would turn on, just to tease me  and fool me into believing she was going to be a good girl this time, but every time she froze when starting up my session.

You see, Olivia is not only cunning. She has great timing. She knew I had a presentation due. A presentation that was only saved in her hard drive. A presentation that I could not re-do in time, since all the information was also in her memory. The one set of files I had forgotten to back up.

Of course I freaked out.

I gave up. I didn't have money to pay what Best Buy wanted me to pay to "fix" Olivia. I was considering sending it back to the factory and redeem the warranty, and just decided to try one last time:

So this last line goes to Olivia: I learned my lesson. You are awesome. Mac stays at work. He's nowhere near as awesome.  Please don't ever do that again!!