Xatal

If you don’t already have a cell phone, you’re definitely going to want one before college. Cell phones are extremely useful nowadays, and if you don’t have one, you’re going to be surprised at how frequently you’re inconvenienced.

You may already have a plan that you’re going to continue, but if you’re open to the idea of a new phone and/or provider, you should definitely make sure you make the right choice.

Depending on where you go to school, the providers that you believe are best may not necessarily be the best choice. I use Verizon — a network that’s normally considered to be very reliable — yet I get the worst service here. Text messages rarely send and calls won’t always go through. That’s only around my dorm, but that’s still a giant inconvenience.

Try your phone out on campus.

If you’re going up for orientation or just to visit, bring your phone up and try to make a few calls while on campus. Get an idea of how good the signal is. Don’t just count the number of bars you have — actually try out your phone and make sure it seems to be reliable. Walk around different spots. If you have an idea where you’ll be living, try your phone out around there especially.

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Since seeing Nihar over at Nihar’s World do this, I’ve thought it might be fun to make monthly posts showing my stats as well. Although my stats aren’t nearly as impressive as his, perhaps you might be interested:

Page views by day for this last month, courtesy of Google Analytics

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It seems like there are a few words that I can just never seem to right way to spell. No matter how many times I write them, I just can’t quite get the spelling down. Spelling words rarely comes hard to me, but these words are just a nuisance.

For every post that I write for Xatal, I (usually) always hit “spellcheck” before posting. Often times, the misspelled words are one of the words I have trouble with. I’ve made a nice list of words that irritate me:

Thank god for spellcheck

1. “Exercise”
2. “Necessary”
3. “Occurring”
4. “Severely”
5. “Separate”
6. “Exaggerate”
7. “Embarrass”

Many times, I can tell that the word looks wrong, but can’t figure out what I did wrong without referring to spellcheck. Even just making this list I misspelled four of them.

What words do you have a hard time remembering to spell?

Fights are an inevitable part of school. They’re also pretty remarkable… as soon as one begins to brew, you can almost feel the tension pulsing throughout the school, and students always have an instinctive sense that tells them which way to go to watch. Students would always crowd around the fight, not only to watch, but to block administrators from breaking up the fight. For a lot students, fights are the best entertainment at lunch. I was the same way — I loved watching fights. Why, I can’t really explain or justify, but I enjoyed spectating.

Sure, school fights rarely involve karate, they draw a lot of attention from everybody.

On the administration’s end, fights are a nightmare. Having to break them up, deal with the students involved, and prevent further fights is definitely a nuisance, and so schools do their best to prevent fights.

A really common method to prevent fights is the “no tolerance” policy: if you are in a fight, you are going to be suspended, no matter what. Over the last ten years, this policy has caught on strongly. But is it fair, and does it really solve problems? I’ve never been convinced.

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If you still have a year left of high school to go, at some point you’re going to need to choose your classes for next year. Picking classes can be a bit tricky when you have to try to strike a balance between classes you’d like to take and classes you should take, as well as trying to fit in all the classes you want to take.

A lot can depend on the classes you take — the choices you make for next year could affect what you can take in the years after that, they could affect how appealing you look to colleges, and they could help determine what field you’d like to (or not like to) have a career in.

So where do you begin in deciding? I recommend starting with a course catalog, if you can find one from your school.

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I was glancing at my Last.fm today, and I’ve finally cleared 200,000 plays. I’ve only seen a handful of people on the site who have more than that, and so I’m, for some weird reason, pretty proud.

My last.fm artists list

I listen to music just about whenever I’m on the computer, and I listen to my iPod when I’m out and not with other friends. Over the four years that I’ve had the account there, I guess the playcounts have just built up over time. I started back when the site was called AudioScrobbler and took weeks to update, and I’ve watched Last.fm mature into a gigantic music site.

Most of that is metal, but I like to think that I spread my listening over a large amount of bands — my most-played band (Opeth)  doesn’t make up even 10% of my total playcounts. I do listen to other genres besides metal, including reggae, post-rock, and indie, so I also like to believe I’m at least somewhat balanced in my musical tastes.

If you have a Last.fm, what’s our compatibility?

Finding a cute way to ask a girl to prom is always fun

So you’ve decided who you would like to go to prom with, and now you’re unsure of how to ask that girl. It’s fun to ask people in cute ways, rather than just “hey wanna go to prom with me?”, but that’s not always the best choice.

When deciding how you should ask a girl, you should first know the answers to these questions:

1. How well do I know this girl? How well does she know me?
2. Would she expect me to ask her to prom?
3. Is she likely to say yes?

Sometimes the answers are obvious — if you’re wondering how to ask your girlfriend, all three will be pretty obvious. Others you may have to take a guess on.

Should I ask in a cute way?

If you think the girl is likely to say yes, then I definitely recommend this. Sure, you could just walk up and ask, but asking a girl in a cute way will make it memorable for the both of you, and you’re going to love her reaction. There’s no need to go overboard in how much time or money you spend on this, but putting at least a little effort into it is definitely worth it.

Some guys may give you a bit of flak for doing more than just asking, but in the end, their dates will be jealous that they didn’t receive the same treatment.

However, if the girl is likely to say no (for whatever reason), I would recommend against it. If you go to great lengths just to ask, and then she says no, you’re going to feel worse than you otherwise would because of the lengths you went to. If your hopes aren’t high, then your best choice is just to simply approach her and ask.

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PDFs are an extremely common format for documents due to the fact that they’re so versatile. A PDF can be viewed on a large variety of platforms while still maintaining all of its formatting.

Adobe Reader is the obvious PDF reader, but Adobe products tend to be extremely slow and bloated, taking forever to open a simple PDF.

Lately, I’ve been giving Foxit Reader a try. Foxit is significantly faster and more compact than Adobe Reader, yet it still has all of the useful functionality of Adobe, and some cool ones of its own (I’m especially liking the annotation feature, where you can make comments onto a PDF file).

Foxit is definitely a great piece of software to have in college, since PDFs are used quite often by many college professors.

To download Foxit, see Foxit Software’s website.