Tech

No, I'm not talking about technology. Though people talking about technology usually makes me break out in hives of panic (programming user interfaces for remotely controlled what now??) nothing scares me more than finding myself in the middle of TECH -yes, THE tech- with no idea where to go. No joke. Even thinking about being lost in tech is enough to induce the rapid forming of beads of cold sweat. To those Tech newbies, tech is the engineering building. It is the height of irony that a building that is designed for -let's face it- the smart people, can be so... hmm... backwards? Let's say unintelligently designed. Like literally, I'm saying totes magotes it defies all rules of strategic/rational planning, space management, logical mobility and directional patterns and/or cues... you get the picture. So I guess all you need to know is.. Tech is an engineer's nightmare. As such an example of non-motivated irrationality should be. But it is actually mostly the enemy of anyone unfortunate enough to not be an engineer and find his or herself in its infinite abyss. WHY? It's not only a 4 story H shaped labyrinth with a tangled spiderwebs worth of pseudopods, the connected little clusters and what department they belong to are completely arbitrary.
Yes, they have a functioning directory. But it is completely unhelpful if you happen not to know the exact name of the room you're looking for, aka LR%&$, and attempting to search by department or class name is basically a futile endeavor: apparently the only thing you can input are exact names and it will only render a match if it is exactly the thing it was programmed to search. Why can't they use like eigenvector algorithms or something like google uses..? Like searching by relevance, links to other frequently searched buildings or "Oh, look, this kind of resembles the name of the building you're looking for!" Instead of stranding you and giving you a phone number (which you can't use inside Tech cause there's no signal grrr...) if the room you were looking for is MR476 and NOT MR467. This could stump you for a good 15 mins. Bring on the cold sweats.
Can you tell I'm speaking from personal experience? Why did they design a building that makes you feel like a trapped hamster inside of a labyrinth specifically designed to drive the unacquainted to frustration, resignation, or even worse.. insanity? Are they trying to keep the dumb hamsters out? Oh... wait. I detect a conspiracy.

Is paper obsolete?

No offense to Gutenberg, but printing sucks. I've had 7 printers in the past 7 years of my life. And that is only because for the past 4 I've refused to buy a new one. Do I just have like the compendium of malfunctioning printer purchases in my town, do I alone make this problem statistically significant? Am I an anomaly? Maybe my roommates and I are not representative of the entire population, but I find it very suspicious that only 1 of our 4 printers still manages to actually print stuff, and that is only if you crouch down and feed it the paper sheet by sheet. Like you would a sick pet. So I don't understand. Has printing technology fallen short of the rate of technological evolution everything else seems to have experienced, or did I just win the defective printer lottery? Cause it has been more times than I can count (and thinking about it is making me grouchy already) that I've had to wake up at the crack of dawn to begin a pilgrimage to the library (not after cursing and yelling at my own printer and throwing fistfuls of crumpled paper at my roommate's) to wait in line behind 20 equally irresponsible Northwestern students as they finish their last minute printing. So I cant be the only one with this conundrum. Right? If so, I would really like to know cause maybe I have crazy extremist luck and could reverse apply this vacuum to Who Wants to be a Millionaire. And yes, I'd had this idea before Slumdog even hit theaters thanks.

Why do computers have those crazy little keyboards?

Ok, this started out as a post to blog about my unhappiness with some computer keys, especially those at the library computers.. but I guess it universally applies to both Mac and PC computers in general. Why do they have keys that look like Stonehenge sticking out like paranoid androids from an otherwise sleek little surface? I admit I'm used to laptops, which have those nifty little low buttons that click just right when you press on them, but I feel anyone would agree that those 3 foot high keys are a hassle to push on. Its like getting a freaking finger workout. Not to mention they look like they belong to an IBM circa the 1800s when supercomputers that acted as calculators and made stew on their hot giant round interfaces were all the rage. Ok, you couldn't have made stew on those interfaces cause their screens were convex and stretching out toward the horizon taking your nose with them, but you know what I mean. So the point is, I really those hate those keyboards. They make typing a very frustrating endeavor. But I guess this stems from a certain bias from not knowing how to type. Yep. Im that person you see in the library pressing button after button with her two tiny little index fingers with her face pushed close to the screen like a moron. I tried to download Mario Teaches Typing but I couldn't find a compatible program with OSX.. and now I just avoid the library. Forever.