Tag: UConn

Thats right. Ann Coulter was speaking at UConn today.

And she packed the Jorgensen (2640 seats…or so). This is basically the College Republicans’ response to Cindy Sheehan’s talk on Monday this week. Unfortunately, I didn’t know about Sheehan until Tuesday, so I don’t know how many people were there or how crazy she was (but I can guess).

There is a huge line outside, where people are waiting in the friggin cold to get in. Some people decided to take advantage of all the people just chilling there to pass out some flyers. All were more or less anti Coulter, but some were more fun than others. My personal favourite:
[image deleted]

Anyway, once we got inside, we figured out why the line was moving so slowly. Everyone who went in was getting frisked, and no backpacks, food, or…well…anything was being allowed in. The frisking was pretty half assed, if I must say. My friend got a knife in (not malicious, just something he carries), and the guard apparantly didn’t notice the huge lump that was my cell phone. Whatever.

We actually got decent seats, on the left (heh) hand side, about five rows from the stage. Kinda wish I knew we would be sitting behind the College Republicans before hand, but alas, there was no turning back.

Ann shows up late, which was extremely annoying, because I was coming down from a sugar high (about an entire package of Swedish Fish). First thing I notice – she is really, really skinny. She’d make Lindsay Lohan look fat. She was accompanied by three dudes in suits who I assumed were body guards, although I was pretty sure they couldn’t stop anyone. Maybe its just the suits that do that to them. Either way, I don’t notice anything for about five minutes because the College Republicans decided she deserved a standing ovation.

Now, for some reason, I honestly thought she’d be using this chance to actually talk about her views, and perhaps try to convince people she actually knew what she was talking about. But no, her talk consisted of ad hominem attacks against Democratic Party members and other people who didn’t agree with her views.

She didn’t explain why or how these people were wrong, but rest assured, they were. Again, I didn’t see Sheehan’s talk, and it probably wasn’t much better (I’m not a fan of either of these women for the record), but I sincerely hope it was more to the point than Ann’s.

Her talk was cut short, however, by someone who tapped into the PA system. I’m not sure if it was the main PA or another set of speakers, but the song Kyle’s Mom is a Bitch from the South Park Movie started to blast. She stopped talking until they figured out how to silence this song, which was a solid five to eight minutes.

Now, I thought this was funny, and a pretty good prank by whoever pulled it off. But it should have stopped sooner. Once they had ‘fixed’ this, she had a few breif words with the body guard standing next to her (seriously, I think I could take this guy out) and announced that she’d be going straight to the Q & A portion of the night.
Seeing how her talk had been going, this was a welcome change of events.

Now, couple things about the Q & A. It really could have done without the insults and the ass-kissing. Both were really annoying, and sucked up time. None were too original or very funny. Some notable questions were (I’m paraphrasing):

Which brand of pen do you use to draw your Hitler moustashe?

And

Is there anything that you could tell us that we don’t know about you?

That question was asked, sincerely, by one of her supporters. There were some good responses from the audience, like “I enjoy long walks on the beach…”, etc.

What I did like about the Q & A section was it actually got her to answer some questions and share her views, which she was obviously never getting to in her talk. Some good questions:

Student: “What would you tell your son if he came out of the closet?”
Ann: ” ‘Did I mention you’re adopted?’ “

Student: “How do you feel about premarital sex?”
Ann: “First of all, that is the worst pick-up line I’ve ever heard.”

Which, I have to admit, is funny. Unfortunately, she tried to keep the joke going, which of course killed it, and never actually answered the question. Way to go.

There were a couple other very good questions, about womens’ right to vote, among other things, but I can’t remember them right now. I’ll post them if I do.

In conclusion, Ann Coulter can blow me.

Ok, I went over my bandwidth in my dorm, so I’m not all that happy.

Basically, the UConn network gives you 5 Gigs for any given 7 days. I knew this was going to be a problem once I heard about it. I can go over 5 gigs in a day if I’m working on something.

If you go over this limit, they knock you down to about 56k speed for a week. If you do it three times, they’ll knock you down to that speed for the rest of the semester.

The thing is, they don’t have any way of letting you know how much bandwidth you’ve used. You can tell what your usage has been for the last week, but not for the current day.

They send you a nice little email telling you that you’ve made a boo-boo, and what the consequences are. They also say several times in the email that your P2P apps will be incredibly slow or non-functional. So I assume this bandwidth cap is in place to limit P2P downloading, keep their students from getting caught and sued, and keeping their names out of the papers.

Perhaps 5% of the total bandwidth I used in the last 7 days have been on a P2P network, and they were on Bittorrent downloading a legitimate file.
Even more was on Yahoo! Music, who I subscribe to. Yahoo! is not P2P, not at all.

This system is bogus. They limit legitimate downloads in their attempt to stop filesharing at their school.

I really, really hate ignorance.

Alright, first blog entry from college.

Couple things. I just noticed my site got crawled by turnitin.com (one of those sites that lets teachers check for plagarised work). So if you were thinking of posting some homework or a paper on here (not really sure why you’d want to), might want to think again.

Anywise, things have been pretty easy going and generally laid back so far. Even though its just the first week, I wouldn’t doubt that this would last throughout the whole year.

But, with the way some of my classes and such are set up, updates will be even more random that they are already. Sundays and Mondays are my worst, and you probably shouldn’t be surprised if there isn’t anything new on the site those days. Otherwise, I just update when I find free time.
I updated today during lunch.

Its fun though. And anything that anyone has told you about college is probably true.

Right, so I’ve gotten distracted at least 5 times while writing this blog entry, and its over an hour since I started it, so I’ll just post it now, and add a new entry if I ever remember what I was going to say.

Crap. I just remembered. I’m not taking that last paragraph back.

I was wearing my Staff shirt from Greyfox today, and a random dude I was passing by recognised the festival. He wasn’t a student, but it was a pretty cool encounter nonetheless. He also helped me figure out where I was going, because I had some lecture in an obscure backroom.

I think thats it, but my brain will probably spite me and remember something again.

Damn. It did. This entry is getting much longer than I had meant it to be.

A friend of mine from back in 6th grade is at UConn. I had’t seen him since then, but it turns out he’s in my major, and a bunch of my classes. Also, he’s the first person on campus who I’ve seen wearing tye-dye (and you should know by now, I think more people outta wear tye-dye).

Oh, right, remembered more stuff. I really, really, really need a minifridge. I really owe the Ryans and my roommate because they’re the ones I’ve been mooching off of this whole week. Oh well.

fin.

I just realized I still haven’t posted about orientation at UConn.

It really wasn’t anything special, and thats probably why. Most of the time our group of almost all guys (engineering major, what do you expect) were hitting on our orientation leader.

I spent most of my time playing cards, or killing time talking about computers.

In our whole orientation group, there were only two people (myself included) who had declared Computer Science as their major. This could make things interesting if it turns out to be a rather small major.

Uh, what else.

The cafe has an ice cream machine, which made me happy. And the Co-op has a 30″ Apple Display which made my day.

Ya, thats really it. Thats what you’ve waited a week to hear. Wonderful, isn’t it?