Winter 2008 - Cornell
It's that time of year again... midterms, spring break, and Dragon Day.
Dragon Day is an old tradition at Cornell, dating back over 100 years.
In the current incarnation, the architecture students go a bit more
insane than normal, build a giant dragon, and then dress in silly costumes
and march across campus to the Engineering Quad:
If the Engineers can be bothered, they construct a Phoenix to fend off
the dragon:
A battle ensues, which always ends in a draw, possibly because of the police
in riot gear who are standing warily nearby:
The dragon continues on the the arts quad, where it is then burned. I think
this is symbolic of something; potentially it symbolizes the love college
students have for burning things.
After that, I had to get back to working on my IISWC paper, which thankfully
had the deadline extended by a week.
Now for some less exciting things.
Here's yet another picture of Triphammer
Falls, which always manages to look scenic:
You know you are in trouble when you not only have warning signs about
killer ice falling off buildings, but you have to build a scaffolding
to protect people:
I have to wonder what the problem was here that necessitated these signs.
Is it a liability problem with people slipping on ice? Were people walking
in the slushy path and dragging salt into the lecture hall? Or were people
walking on the cleared landscaping instead of the path? In any case,
I walked the non-cleared path just to be contrary.
The following sign is a good example of why a little bit of punctuation
can really help clear up what it is you are trying to say:
These benches always bother me. Someone cut down a huge tree, making
one single massive beam with many potential uses... and they make a
bench out of it?
Anyway, I had a camera on campus already, so why not take pictures of my
office. The walls in our office were boring, so I have gradually hung
up pictures from my travels. It gives the undergrads something to look
at while waiting their turns during office hours. You can also see
LED lights if you look carefully.
We have the traditional white board. I used to update the guinea pig
picture with the seasons, but someone has stolen all of our dry-erase
markers so it's hard to make snow without a black one, and I can't update
the guinea pig until I can find another orange one. The circuit board
hanging at the top is a disassembled Pentium II cartridge.
And I'll end with what it looks like out my window from December through
April (I'm exagerating. Sometimes it snows in November too).
To the left is the Cornell baseball field (I had a better angle to
watch from in my old office). You can't tell from the picture, but the
odd projection of Rhodes Hall (the big green thing) causes weird wind
vortexes, so often the snow goes *up* outside my window instead of down.
With any luck, the snow will stop by May, and I can move on to unsuccessfully
trying to grow cantaloupe on our deck again.
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