Sara’s Weblog – ATEC 3325

I recently heard an episode of A Prairie Home Companion on NPR. This segment places Garrison Keillor on a road trip with all of the Presidential candidates. This is ab episode from February, so Hilary Clinton is included, as well as George Bush, Al Gore, and Ronald Reagan.

This is where you can find the original audio file and the script:

http://prairiehome.publicradio.org/programs/2008/02/09/scripts/candidates.shtml

To listen to the file you’ll need Real Audio Player, which you can download for free here: http://www.real.com/

I just wanted to take a minute to express my love of the NPR show, Wait, Wait…Don’t Tell Me! My uncle told me about it late this summer, and ever since I’ve been hooked. It’s clever, funny, and slightly educational. If you like the Daily Show or the Colbert Report you’ll like this program. Best of all you can download podcasts of the show for free. I think the actual program is broadcasted on Saturday mornings, although I’m not sure, becuase I alway just download the podcasts.

I think this is an uderappreciated program and that more people should listen to it.

Left 4 Dead is coming out kind of soon, and I’m not sure if I’ll like it or not. It’s made by Valve, a company I adore (except for Counter Strike), so theoretically it should be awesome. My issue is the horror aspect, I typically don’t like horror movies or games mostly because I hate when things jump out at me. I’m not fond of being startled. But the game looks fun, and maybe when I’m playing with other people I can get over the pop-out-and-surprise-you- aspect of a lot of horror games.

Regardless of how I feel about the game, I’ll probably end up getting it becuase my boyfriend REALLY wants to play it, and the adds even tell you to bring your friends. I know a few other people who are going to get it, so hopefully I’ll at least be in good company.

Sergeant Truffles is adorable, but she’s still a bit timid. I bought a book about house rabbits, and it said it could a rabbit several weeks or a few months to really get comfortable in her new surroundings. Even though she won’t let us pet her just yet, she’s really fun to watch. When we let her out of her hutch she hops around the apartment. It’s the cutest thing. Sometimes she’ll be sitting still then suddenly hop straight up in the air. My room mate and I figured out pretty quickly that she can’t be left alone in a room or she’ll start chewing. She leaves most things alone, but she LOVES power cords. We tried to hide most of the cords as best we could, but you better watch out if you leave your laptop charger lying around.

You know what’s a great game? Team Fortress 2.

My boyfriend forced me to play it this summer and I’m glad he did. At first I didn’t think I’d really like it, since I usually don’t like first person shooters. Freshman year I was forced to play Counter Strike and I really didn’t enjoy the experience, so I was hesitant to try TF2.

The thing that I like a lot about TF2 is the roles, it has slight RPG aspect to it, and isn’t just a spray of bullets and missiles. It completely changes the dynamics of the game; I never thought a FPS could be done in such an interesting way.

A couple of days ago I finished Portal, and it’s one of the best games I have ever played. It was both fun and challenging and very enjoyable to play; I hope there is a Portal Two in production. One of the things I enjoyed most about the game was the dialogue from GLaDOS, especially towards the end of the game. Portal features some of the best writing I have ever experienced in a video game; it’s clever and humorous, but in a dark and cynical way, which is both very interesting and appealing to me.

I found a really interesting article on Digg, written by a blogger about his perspective on GLaDOS. You can read it here [http://www.game-ism.com/2008/04/04/still-alive-shes-free/]. It makes you view her in a different way, you kind of feel sorry for the poor girl, hanging upside down from the ceiling.

I highly recommend playing this game, it’s one of the best out there, and definetly one of my all-time favorites.

“Didn’t we have some fun, though? Remember when the platform was sliding into the fire pit and I said ‘Goodbye’ and you were like ‘Nnoo Wwaayy,’ and then I was all ‘We pretended we were going to murder you,’ that was great.” -GLaDOS

A couple of weeks ago my room mate and I adopted a pet bunny; we were very excited. We adopted the rabbit from a shelter about an hour away in Heath, TX. It was really less of a “shelter” and more of a woman’s house who had too many rabbits. Our rabbit is sooo cute, she has the most adorable ears that sometimes lop over. She’s a mix between a Holland Lop and a New Zealand; she’s pretty big for a rabbit. The woman we got her from was calling her Rosa, or Rosey, but my room mate and I weren’t really fond of that name. It took us over two weeks, but we’ve finally come up with a new name for her: Sergeant Truffles. We usually just call her Truffles.

I searched the web for a story relating to this, and couldn’t find much; but then I remember I’ve had a semi-personal experience with this very topic.

My junior year Xanga was very popular at my high school…until one of the Vice Principals started browsing student pages and getting them into trouble for pictures they were posting on Xangas. So, if you there were pictures of you, say at a party holding a “red cup,” on any student’s Xanga you got a call to report to the office. This certain vice principal also notified your parents and shared with them what was going on.

The whole thing was blown out of proportion, I found it extremely stupid. I had a close friend call me in a panic to delete her entire Xanga because the vice principal found it and was about to show her mother some rather incriminating pictures.

First of all, I think the school didn’t have any right to punish students for what they posted online. One, because these events didn’t happen on campus; and two, no school clubs or groups were involved. Secondly, the kids were stupid to post drunken pictures of themselves online; don’t post something you wouldn’t want everyone to see.

I actually found interesting article about businesses limiting what their employees could post online about themselves in blogs, profiles, or other sites. This is becoming increasingly common in fields where employees have a personal site displaying a portfolio or professional work.

So, Microsoft has begun a new line of commercials to combat the popular Mac ads.

The first in this new series were ads featuring Bill Gates and Jerry Seinfeld, and honestly, they were bad. They just didn’t make sense and I didn’t understand the point Microsoft was trying to make. Also, they were extremely long.

Shortly after these first couple of Gates and Seinfeld commercials aired, Microsoft began airing another line of commercials that I actually thought were very well done. These begin with “PC” saying that he’s been made into a stereotype, and then a very diverse group of people from around the world and across a range of professions proclaim they are PCs. I thought this was a clever idea, because even though the Mac ads are amusing, they do negatively stereotype PC users. I thought Microsoft came up with an appropriate response.

And just to throw it out there, I’m a PC.

I think McCain is trying to appear like he really cares about the economy; he cares so much that he must put his presidential campaign on hold to fix this crisis. What? McCain has nothing to do with fixing the economy, the only thing he can do is vote, and it won’t take him a week to vote. I feel he’s made some bad publicity decisions this week. Bailing on Letterman at the last minute did not turn out in his favor either, especially since he didn’t return to Washington “immediately” like he said he was going to.