My California is prettier than yours

In general I really like my schedule. Most of my classes are clustered (both in space and time), which is good. It minimizes both my stress level travelling between consecutive classes and the amount of time that I have to spend lurking around campus. I live pretty far from campus (~10 miles), so I really try to go to campus only once a day.

Tuesday is the one day where that doesn't really work out. I have two classes on Tuesday. One at 9, the other at 5. So yeah. I don't want to find ways to kill that much time on campus... So I go home in between.

But other than that, Tuesdays are kind of fun. The morning class is the lab component for my GIS class. In general, I'm not sure if I like my GIS class. The lectures are really boring, and from what I hear, the tests are mundane, requiring specific knowledge of details that in real situations you would never need to know. Aah, pedagogy. The labs are really fun though. We basically just play around with the GIS program on the computer for three hours. We're given a set lists of tasks to perform, of course. And of course, what I learn in this class will be really useful come time I actually start doing research...

It's great. I sit next to my friend Eli, and we pretty much goof around the entire time. We do the work, but we keep ourselves entertained while we do =). We seriously must be the class troublemakers... I wonder if that conflicts at all with the whole "grad student image".

I guess there were maybe two highlights in today's hilarity-filled class =). The first is that throughout the entire class we would rate each other's maps. It's really weird. Apparently ArcMap, the mapping program we use, arbitrarily decides on the colors to make things each time you open the application. Weird. So we had quite a few "My California is prettier than yours" moments. Inevitably his computer would choose a nice lavender while mine opted for poop. Or maybe I'd get teal and he'd be given puke. So of course, we would then have to change the colors. The color names are pretty classic too. Things like "sunburst yellow" or "quetzal green". I ended up with the best Californias of the day. Instead of going with a solid color, I assigned them the mottled patterns that are typically used for marshes or glaciers on biotic community maps (these were for 2 different Californias...). They were a little bit too busy to be visually analyzed easily, but they were damn pretty. =) Highlight two was when I convinced Eli to leave the path of virtue and join the dark side...