Xatal

We’re all familiar with Google Suggest, that wonderful box that pops up as you type in your search on Google and suggests what you might be searching for. It can help save you the trouble of typing out a long sentence, but I’ve found it’s a lot more useful for humor than anything else.

A lot of searches are pretty reasonable, but in most batches, there’s that one weird one that just makes you think, “who the hell searches for that?!”:

It’s really surprising to see the things people actually search for, but believe it or not, these are real. I spent some time typing in different common phrases to see just what Google searches were suggested. The results were pretty entertaining…

* These might be a bit offensive on a variety of levels, you’ve been warned.

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When it comes time to take out a loan for a house or a car in the future, a huge indicator to lenders is your credit score, which reflects on how you repay purchases that are bought on credit — money that you “borrow”. If you pay everything back in full and on-time, your credit score will be higher and will reflect on you better than if you make late payments or small payments.

Building a solid credit score is essential to your financial well being after you graduate from college, so it’s in your best interest to start building your credit score now. The easiest way to do so is with a credit card. Read the rest of this entry »

This one had me baffled for a while, but I think I finally figured it out.

I have Google Reader integrated with FireFox, and every morning I check my favorite blogs for new posts. I subscribe to my own to make sure that my posts come out just fine, and I was noticing lately that all of my posts have been appearing twice! Read the rest of this entry »

In order to improve this blog a bit, I’m going to be going through old posts this next week and fixing things up a bit. Seeing as it’s been months since I’ve written many of these posts, there are undoubtedly things that can be changed. I’ll check every post and make the following changes:

• Improve grammar/spelling/style.
• Update outdated information.
• Add links to more detailed and recent posts.
• Optimize appearances for the theme
• Add images when necessary

Seeing as Xatal has about 190 posts, this could take a bit. My goal is about twenty posts per day, let’s see how things go!

With the bad economy and all, finding a job for the summer has never been tougher. While you hunt for a summer job to make some money, you’ll inevitably watch what money you do have steadily dwindle. If you’re unable to find a job or cannot work over the summer for other reasons, such as taking classes, then you’ll need to save money any way that you can.

Here are a few ways to keep your wallet thick with money: Read the rest of this entry »

One of the unfortunate truths about college is that theft can still occur there. Your car can be broken into, and your bike can be stolen.

Easily one of the biggest targets for thieves is laptops. Think about it — you’re holding a one-thousand dollar piece of technology designed to be portable. For thieves, stealing a laptop isn’t too hard, and few people will even notice. During my freshman year, my friend’s car was broken into and his computer was stolen. One student even broke into an on-campus apartment to steal computers.

So how can you protect your valuable laptop from theft? Read the rest of this entry »

When I think back to third grade, one of the most prominent memories of the schoolwork we did was our large “Handwriting” books that we were required to write in to learn cursive. Each day, we would learn a different letter, practicing it a zillion times on its own and in sentences until we could master its use. Our teacher would check our books occasionally to make sure that we were still writing it just fine.

Cursive handwriting books

I went to a private school through sixth grade, and cursive was definitely forced on us there. Once we learned how to write in cursive, we were expected to always use cursive in any writing we turned in. Teachers wouldn’t accept our work if it wasn’t in cursive. They claimed that only cursive was used in the “real world”, and that printing was inferior and for little kids.

In seventh grade, I finally began to attend public school, where it was perfectly fine to print. Out of habit, I used cursive for the first couple of weeks until I decided to give printing a try again. I quickly found out why most people never bother with cursive. Read the rest of this entry »