Stauf'sHours...

This is more for me than anyone else, but if you go to college in Columbus, Ohio, (and there are a bunch of colleges here,) Stauf's is a great place to study. (If you can get a seat.) It's great coffee and free wi-fi.

Their hours are:
Monday-Thursday: 6:30 a.m. to 11:00 p.m.
Friday: 6:30 a.m. to midnight
Saturday: 7:00 a.m. to midnight
Sunday: 8:00 a.m. to 10:30 p.m.

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Now playing: Josh Joplin Group - Listening
via FoxyTunes

New blog, (not mine)

I'm not sure how many of you read my newswire at the bottom right of this site, but there's a new blog I'm going to be linking to. If you do read the stories, you'll notice a site called Zen Habits shows up a lot. The same guy who writes that is starting a new site called Write to Done. It's full of tips for people who write. If you've got term papers or something, it's a great place to look for some good tips.

However, don't go there the day before a term paper is due; that's just procrastination.

Finally, here's something funny about term papers.

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Now playing: U2 - Last Night On Earth
via FoxyTunes

Good Note-taking Habits...

I put a lot of stress on taking good notes. However, a lot of times, some professors can make that difficult.

How so? They use Power Point.

What's so awful about Power Point? It can make the presenter lazy. A lot of people just put all of their information, and I do mean all, into slides and read it aloud. Before I go further, let me tell a story from undergrad.

I took art history as an elective. I was excited for it. I love art. I love history. It's the perfect match.

Then I had my first day of class.

Class was set up in a very specific way.
1. Quiz on assigned readings
2. Lecture

What's so bad about that? The lecture was the professor reading from the book and showing us pictures from the book. Also, attendance was something like 20% of your grade and the professor's best use of her TAs was to set them near the door and get the names of any student
leaving and mark them as absent.

One other thing, the professor spoke like a female Ben Stein.

Every day I fell asleep in class.

One day I thought I'd outsmart her and bring a Gameboy to play in class. I didn't think to bring headphones though. As riveting as Tetris was, it didn't fully block out her voice.

I fell asleep. What's more, my head rolled back on the theater-style seat and I started to snore.
I startled awake to a rumbling bass.

I had snored loud enough to wake myself up.

I was really embarrassed. I leaned over to the girl sitting next to me to apologize but she was still asleep.

The moral of this story is that innefectual lecturing is inescapable.

However, there is a lot you can do with this.

First, do your best to listen for contexts of what might be important. If you've got your Power Point slides in front of you, this shouldn't be too hard.

Next, copy your notes after class. A lot of people have thanked me for putting my notes on-line and I'm very glad to help, but I have an ulterior motive for doing so. Re-typing my notes forces me to look at them again and reconsider them. I'm not an auditory learner or a reading learner, (I forgot the technical term for that.) However, when I go over them again, I try
to imagine what is actually happening is the body and I get it.

Also, if you're one of my regular professors, this isn't targeted specifically at you. We did just have a guest lecturer though that fell into this in a hard way.

Of Zoho and Google Docs...

If you use my class notes, (note the link on the right,) you'll notice a change today. The other day, Zoho made a ton of my notes disappear. That, combined with overall bugginess caused me to move my notes back to Google Docs.

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Now playing: U2 - I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking for
via FoxyTunes

Add something to your presentations...

Good graphics can really add something nice to your presentations, (or papers too if you're into that.) I just figured out what WikiCommons is. It's an extension of the Wikipedia that is just free media. There are tons of pictures of art, architecture, famous people and nature that you can use for free.

Also, they have audio, video and a few other things that'll help spice up a presentation.

Also, beware of media overload. Not every slide needs to be a picture or have a video clip. If you're giving a presentation, you should be the star.

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Now playing: Watershed - Mercurochrome
via FoxyTunes

Quicksilver...

If you own a Mac laptop, or probably just any Mac, you should get Quicksilver. It's a task launcher. You know that little bar at the bottom? It's just like that, except it opens more than just programs. It can start e-mails to people, web pages, or even start e-mails.

I'm personally not a big fan of the track pad, and it's a great alternative. The way it works, is you press [ctrl] + [Space] and a box pops up. You type the first letter or two of whatever you want and it'll open up.

There's some kind of super power usage for it, but I'm not that good yet.

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Now playing: Slate Magazine - Slate: The Iowa Gabfest
via FoxyTunes

Happy Hours for OSU Grad Students!

Next Thursday, January 10th at 6:00 p.m., at McFaddens in the Gateway there will be an OSU grad student happy hour. The one I went to last quarter had a lot of free appetizers and semi-ok drink specials.

Next grad student happy hour after this one is the Leap Year Happy Hour on Friday, February 29^th at 6pm at Bar Louie.

New class notes...

Notes from this quarter have begun. (Check out the class notes link in the sidebar.)

More easy citations...

I've mentioned BibMe before but here are five more ways to outsource your citations for free.