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August 12, 2004
Spring Break Planning
I haven't been up to a whole lot lately. Monday after class I basically just sat around all evening and wrote some emails to people, some of whom I haven't talked to in ages. Hopefully they respond. And if any of you feel like dropping me an email, I promise I'll try to write back to you too! Everyone likes something (non-spam) in the mailbox, be it email, voicemail or snail mail.
Tuesday was CU day once again, and we had a guest speaker from Sydney give a talk at CBT entitled "What If God Really Exists?" It was a really good talk, and helped reinforce several things. After the growth groups and all that stuff in the evening, Rowan, James, Brad We & I got some food at KFC (yeah, they have those down here) and brought it to Rob & Simone's house, and just hung out with a bunch of CU people, it was cool.
Wednesday was a really long day of class. But I had my first test in Fluid Dyanamics, and I think I did well on it. Too bad it's only worth 5%. Apparently quite a few people stuffed it up though. I didn't think it was that hard, but that's probably just because I actually took the time to study for it. But it's good having David back lecturing. Last week he was gone and we had Simon in his stead all week. Simon lived up to his reputation for going through material at a hundred miles an hour and confusing the heck out of everyone. I also have Simon as the lecturer for one of my weather classes, so last week I had a double dose of him every day. What fun! And if it weren't for the field trips to the Grampians and Wilson's Prom that we're gonna be taking in Experiencing the Australian Landscape, I'd probably drop it because it's such a huge waste of time. The prof rambles on and on about pointless things and goes off on totally unrelated tangents. That, and he doesn't speak clearly, but rather slurs and muffles all his words together. It's a struggle for me to even understand him, and none of the foreign students who are learning English while they're here don't ever have a clue what he's saying, I feel bad for them. He has horrible time management too. Case in point: after rambling and reading this Aboriginal story that none of us could understand for quite some time, he realized that he hadn't had us go practice with the stoves that we'll need to use to cook in the Grampians, and there was only 10-15 minutes of class left. So he still had us go outside to learn how to use the stoves, and we all had to stay a half hour late; we were all quite annoyed and didn't care about the stoves at that point. My only hope is that the field trips will make that class worth two hours of abject pointlessness every Wednesday evening. Is it any wonder that this class is in the "education" faculty (department)?
Wednesday evening CU had a BBQ at Rob & Simone's house, because Philip, the same guy from Sydney who spoke at CBT on Tuesday, was there to give another talk, "What If God Really Loves?" If any of you want to know the answer to that question, go read Romans 5:8. And if its meaning doesn't come to you immediately, I urge you to camp out at that verse until it does. That's what Philip's entire talk was on, that one verse and its significance. For any of us to demand that God show us something more as proof that He loves us, something in addition to the fact that He sent His only Son to die on a cross to save us, is the highest insult, or at best a gross misunderstanding of the unthinkably immense price of that gift. And by reading the verses around that, it's clear that there's no middle ground when it comes to God: we are either His friends or His enemies. I don't know about you, but the thought that I was an enemy of the Creator of the universe before being saved is immensely frightening.
Today I've spent much of the afternoon and evening trying to track down the cheapest airfare/busfare up to Cairns, Townsville or Airlie Beach to go see the Great Barrier Reef over spring break (the last week in September). Rich and some other UW-Eau Claire people who are at Southern Cross Uni over in Lismore this semester are heading up to Cairns for break, and I'm gonna meet them up there. Now it's just working out whether we'll be wanting to just stay in Cairns and go out and see a bunch of stuff from there, or if we'll want to go down to Airlie Beach and the Whitsunday Islands for a couple days, because that'll have a big influence on my choice of airfare (in terms of price and destination). Hopefully we can get everything pretty much set within the next week.
And there are several links that I'd like to pass along. First, House Speaker Dennis Hastert has proposed a dramatic overhaul of the US tax system, and President Bush should definitely listen to Hastert's good economic ideas. Just why is Kerry's Vietnam war record a central issue of the campaign? Oh yeah, because Kerry and the Democrats made it a primary issue during their convention! And Kerry's making some key mistakes in his campaign now, like answering questions. And to all of you Bush-haters out there who have been Michael Moore-ized, did it feel like a sucker punch to the gut when Kerry said that knowing what we know now, he would've gone to war in Iraq as well? I thought that was the keystone issue in your crusade against Bush, and now your candidate has betrayed you. How does it feel? It's just more proof that Kerry can't be trusted with the leadership of the world's most powerful nation. Some schools in Alabama are making it so that boys and girls can no longer study each other in core classes. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute have found that we're in a period of unusually high sunspot activity, which is a cause of at least some of the warming we've experienced in the last 150 years. In somewhat lighter news, an unknown tour bus dumped its load on unsuspecting passengers on a boat in the Chicago River; so who did the passengers blame? Dave Matthews. Memo to Josh: don't be tempted to take Wilson on the plane to Japan with you. And Microsoft is at it again. It seems they're releasing "XP Lite" in select Asian countries such as Thailand. You know, an operating system that's designed to be so crappy, it can't even print! Way to go Microsoft, releasing crap software! I thought it was a joke when I read it initially, but it's true, at least according to CNN (which isn't necessarily a guarantee of veracity). More proof that truth is stranger than fiction. And in satirical news from The Onion, it seems that President Bush is going a little overboard with his blog, hehe.
Oh, and with the little weather widget that I added to my webpage on the sidebar (which gives Melbourne time and the current temp in both F and C), now all of you back home can see that it's been as cold in Minnesota and Wisconsin this week, in mid-summer, as it is down here in Melbourne in mid-winter. I find that kind of humorous actually. But it's more fun seeing the Aussie reactions when I tell them it's the same temp back home right now, and that it's the middle of summer there! I'm probably not encouraging them to go visit MN/WI by telling them things like that though, hehe.
Posted by Jared at August 12, 2004 11:59 PM