Xatal

If you have a son, daughter, boyfriend, girlfriend, or friend in college and are not sure what to get him/her, thinking of good ideas can be a bit tough.

In dorms, college kids don’t typically have much with them — dorms in themselves are a rather limited lifestyle. If the person you’re shopping for lives in an apartment, there are a few more options, but they tend to be a bit different.

Gifts for college students

• Posters! AllPosters has many different posters, though if you’re unsure, a gift certificate may be better.
• Quality snacks — cookies, crackers, candy, or anything that can be eaten in a dorm. Dining hall food often leaves a lot to be desired, so snacks are always welcome.
• Gift certificates. Find stores near the college that are easily accessible. Fast food, restaurants, and cheap retail stores are always a sure bet.
• Cooking supplies (for students in an apartment). My mom always gets George Foreman grills — easy to use but very essential to have.
• Quality furnishings — nice towels, simple carpets, lamps, chairs, and so forth. Obviously most of these are more necessary in an apartment.
• Bean bag chairs! Perfect for having people over to hang out.
• NetFlix subscription. You’d be surprised how handy this can be.

Apologies a thousand times for the lack of posts, I’ve really been meaning to post more often, but due to final snad other complications, I haven’t had much opportunity to lately.

However, now that I’m off for the next three weeks, I’ll have more time to post.

If you have anything you’d like to see a post about, I emphasize the Contact page, where you can send me whatever question or suggestion you have. I’m always open to ideas!

Due to extreme cuts in California’s budget, schools are not being given as much money as normal, and so teachers can’t afford to buy all of the paper they need for tests, handouts, and so forth. In order to raise money to afford to print out papers, one teacher has a creative solution: sell advertising space.

According to USA Today, a high school teacher in San Diego has begun selling advertising space on his paper to help meet the costs of supplies. Keep reading »

This year is flying by already, and it’s really been catching me off-guard. Senior year in high school flew by as well, but I’m even more surprised that this year is going by faster.

This is my last week of actual classes, and after that comes a week of finals. I’m unlucky enough to have a final on the very last block, so by then many will have already gone home for the holidays.

In a sense I think it would be pretty cool to have Christmas here — sort of a Harry Potter-esque thing — to wake up with friends and unwrap gifts, hang out under a Christmas tree, and so forth. But of course that’s not going to happen. My roommate and I put up some Christmas lights which actually look pretty cool, we might actually keep them all year around.

Again, I’m sorry for the big lack of updates. I’m pretty upset with myself, since I’d been meaning to write a good amount of posts last month, what with applications being due and all, but I didn’t. November was a really disappointing month for myself, and I’m sorry to my readers for that.

Although of course every college has its due date, a huge amount of colleges have their applications due tomorrow.

Hopefully you haven’t put it off too long, as by now it’s nearing the end. Try not to cut it any closer than you have to. When my brother turned in his UC applications, he was technically too late, but they ended up giving another day because the server crashed from all the last minute applications being sent in. You don’t want to take that chance.

Good luck with your applications. Now you can take a rest from the stress of them and simply wait to see where you get in :)

Sorry about the downtime we had over the past few days. One of the servers that hosted this site had to be completely replaced, so it took a couple of days for that to happen. On the plus side, the server should be faster than ever now, which is always nice :)

Hope everybody had a great Thanksgiving!

I realize I haven’t been updating much lately. For the most part, I’ve just been rather busy with school work and other things.

Mainly, I have a nasty habit of procrastinating, so when it’s the night before I plan to make a post and I have to choose between writing out a post or doing the homework that I put off, I end up choosing the homework and don’t have enough time to write out a decent post. Of course, my lack of time management is my fault and I do apologize for the infrequent updates. Hopefully soon I’ll be able to have a regular schedule.

That and I’ve been playing Fallout 3. A lot, actually. Fun game!

So luckily, my TA for a discussion section on Tuesday night decided to cancel it due to the election, so I was able to watch the results fully as they unfolded.

As I mentioned earlier, I am an Obama supporter, and at first I was a bit anxious watching the votes come in — while Obama was doing well, he wasn’t winning anything Kerry hadn’t in 2004. But as the night went on, he began to do better and better, and of course he ended up winning it.

Although I disagreed with him on many issues, I do have a good deal of respect for John McCain and I think he was a reasonable candidate. Had McCain been our president for the last 8 years instead of Bush, I think our country would be in a different position than it is now. But, in the end, I feel that Obama’s stances are more along the lines of where we need to go.

The rest of the Western world was pretty in favor of us electing Obama, and I think we’ve begun to redeem ourselves for a lot of what’s gone wrong over the last 8 years.

How Obama will do remains to be seen, but I’m optimistic.